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Mosquitto MQTT Broker

Eclipse Mosquitto 2.1.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, set up as a private MQTT broker. Clients connect over TLS with a user name and password, a topic ACL decides what each user may read and write, and retained messages and durable sessions survive restarts. This page covers what is on the image, its defaults and how billing works.

Launch on AWS Marketplace Getting started

What is on the image

  • Mosquitto 2.1.2, built from the official source release with TLS. The broker is /usr/sbin/mosquitto; the clients mosquitto_pub, mosquitto_sub and mosquitto_passwd are in /usr/bin.
  • A systemd service, mosquitto, that runs as the unprivileged mosquitto user.
  • First-boot setup that creates this instance's TLS certificates, three example users with random passwords, and the topic ACL. Nothing secret is baked into the image.
  • A helper client, /opt/sushi/bin/mosquitto-as.sh, that publishes or subscribes as one of the example users without putting the password on the command line.
  • A walkthrough script, /opt/sushi/docs/demo.sh.

WebSockets, the SQLite persistence plugin and the HTTP API are not built in. There is no browser dashboard: Mosquitto is a headless broker.

Defaults

Setting Default
Listener mqtts://127.0.0.1:8883 (TLS, loopback only)
Anonymous access Off
Users publisher, subscriber and denied, see Users and topic ACL
Persistence On, in /var/lib/mosquitto/data/mosquitto.db
Client certificates Not required

t3.medium with an encrypted gp3 root volume of at least 16 GiB and at least 2 GiB of memory. No inbound security group rules are needed: you connect with AWS Systems Manager Session Manager, and reach the broker through Session Manager port forwarding or a private proxy.

Billing

You pay an hourly software fee while the instance runs, as shown in the offer terms on the listing. AWS bills EC2, EBS and data transfer separately.

Where to go next

Upstream project

Eclipse Mosquitto is open source under EPL-2.0 or BSD-3-Clause. See the Mosquitto documentation for the configuration file and client options. Software Sushi packages the image; the Eclipse Foundation does not endorse or support it.