Get Started

Overview

EMQ X (Erlang MQTT Broker) is an open source MQTT broker written in Erlang/OTP. Erlang/OTP is a concurrent, fault-tolerant, soft-realtime and distributed programming platform. MQTT is an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol powering IoT, M2M and Mobile applications.

The EMQ X project is aimed to implement a scalable, distributed, extensible open-source MQTT broker for IoT, M2M and Mobile applications that hope to handle millions of concurrent MQTT clients.

Highlights of the EMQ X broker:

  • Full MQTT V3.1/3.1.1 & V5.0 Protocol Specifications Support
  • Easy to Install - Quick Install on Linux, Mac and Windows
  • Massively scalable - Scaling to 1 million connections on a single server
  • Cluster and Bridge Support
  • Easy to extend - Hooks and plugins to customize or extend the broker
  • Pluggable Authentication - LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis Authentication Plugins

Features

  • Full MQTT V3.1/V3.1.1 & V5.0 protocol specifications support
  • QoS0, QoS1, QoS2 Publish and Subscribe
  • Session Management and Offline Messages
  • Retained Message
  • Last Will Message
  • TCP/SSL Connection
  • MQTT Over WebSocket(SSL)
  • HTTP Publish API
  • STOMP protocol
  • MQTT-SN Protocol
  • CoAP Protocol
  • STOMP over SockJS
  • $SYS/# Topics
  • ClientID Authentication
  • IpAddress Authentication
  • Username and Password Authentication
  • Access control based on IpAddress, ClientID, Username
  • Authentication with LDAP, Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL and HTTP API
  • Cluster brokers on several servers
  • Bridge brokers locally or remotely
  • mosquitto, RSMB bridge
  • Extensible architecture with Hooks, Modules and Plugins
  • Passed eclipse paho interoperability tests
  • Local subscription
  • Shared subscription

Quick Start

Download and Install

The EMQ X broker is cross-platform, which could be deployed on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, Windows and even Raspberry Pi.

Download binary package from: https://emqx.io/downloads.

Installing on Mac, for example:

unzip emqx-macosx-v3.0.zip && cd emqx

# Start EMQ X
./bin/emqx start

# Check Status
./bin/emqx_ctl status

# Stop EMQ X
./bin/emqx stop

Installing from Source

Note

The EMQ X broker requires Erlang/OTP R21+ to build since 3.0 release.

git clone https://github.com/emqx/emqx.git

cd emqx && make rel

cd rel/emqx && ./bin/emqx console

Web Dashboard

A Web Dashboard will be loaded when the EMQ X broker is started successfully.

The Dashboard helps check running status of the broker, monitor statistics and metrics of MQTT packets, query clients, sessions, topics and subscriptions.

Default Address https://localhost:18083
Default User admin
Default Password public
_images/dashboard.png

Plugins

The EMQ X broker could be extended by Plugins. A plugin is an Erlang application that adds extra feature to the EMQ X broker:

emqx_retainer Store Retained Messages
emqx_dashboard Web Dashboard
emqx_auth_clientid Authentication with ClientId
emqx_auth_username Authentication with Username and Password
emqx_plugin_template Plugin template and demo
emqx_auth_ldap LDAP Auth Plugin
emqx_auth_http Authentication/ACL with HTTP API
emqx_auth_mysql Authentication with MySQL
emqx_auth_pgsql Authentication with PostgreSQL
emqx_auth_redis Authentication with Redis
emqx_auth_mongo Authentication with MongoDB
emqx_sn MQTT-SN Protocol Plugin
emqx_coap CoAP Protocol Plugin
emqx_stomp STOMP Protocol Plugin
emqx_recon Recon Plugin
emqx_reloader Reloader Plugin
emqx_web_hook Web Hook Plugin
emqx_lua_hook Lua Hook Plugin

A plugin could be enabled by ‘bin/emqx_ctl plugins load’ command.

For example, enable ‘emqx_auth_pgsql’ plugin:

./bin/emqx_ctl plugins load emqx_auth_pgsql

One Million Connections

Latest release of the EMQ X broker is scalable to 1.3 million MQTT connections on a 12 Core, 32G CentOS server.

Note

The EMQ X broker only allows 512 concurrent connections by default, for that ‘ulimit -n’ limitation is set to 1024 on most platform.

We need to tune the OS Kernel, TCP Stack, Erlang VM and EMQ X broker for one million connections benchmark.

Linux Kernel Parameters

# 2M:
sysctl -w fs.file-max=2097152
sysctl -w fs.nr_open=2097152
echo 2097152 > /proc/sys/fs/nr_open

# 1M:
ulimit -n 1048576

TCP Stack Parameters

# backlog
sysctl -w net.core.somaxconn=65536

Erlang VM

emqx/etc/emqx.conf:

## Erlang Process Limit
node.process_limit = 2097152

## Sets the maximum number of simultaneously existing ports for this system
node.max_ports = 1048576

Max Allowed Connections

emqx/etc/emqx.conf ‘listeners’:

## Size of acceptor pool
listener.tcp.acceptors = 64

## Maximum number of concurrent clients
listener.tcp.max_clients = 1000000

Test Client

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="500 65535"
echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/fs/nr_open
ulimit -n 100000

MQTT Client Libraries

GitHub: https://github.com/emqtt

emqttc Erlang MQTT Client
emqtt_benchmark MQTT benchmark Tool
CocoaMQTT Swift MQTT Client
QMQTT QT MQTT Client

Eclipse Paho: https://www.eclipse.org/paho/

MQTT.org: https://github.com/mqtt/mqtt.github.io/wiki/libraries