This is a feature and bugfix release. This is the most significant release for the mosquitto project so far. It encompasses >20% of the total commits for the project and has an increase in source tarball size of 95%, mostly down to the new bundled tests and new man pages. It introduces lots of new features for the broker and improves the API of the client libraries, although this does mean that the libraries are incompatible with previous releases. I apologise for this and hope you'll agree that the changes are worth it.

I've been overwhelmed with the amount of feedback that I've received recently, thanks to everyone that has got in touch to let me know where something could be improved. I'd particularly like to thank Nicholas Humfrey for setting me on the continuous integration path.

On a slightly different note, my wife was expecting our first child two days ago so it's quite likely I'll be less responsive to support requests for a little while.

Significant changes

These are what I think are the exciting changes for this release.

  • SSL/TLS support across the board - the broker, client libraries and pub/sub clients. This provides certificate based network encryption in a very similar manner to SSL in a web browser where the client verifies that the server is valid. It is also possible to use client certificates to authenticate the clients with the server.
  • TLS-PSK support (not on Python). This is "pre-shared-key" network encryption and represents a simpler encryption interface than certificate based encryption which makes it much more suitable for embedded/constrained devices.
  • The Python client library is now written in pure Python so is much easier to use. It supports Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.* (no SSL support for 2.6).
  • All client libraries have had their interface overhauled and should now be much saner and straightforward to use.
  • The client libraries have thread support.
  • Passwords files for the broker are stored hashed and salted and a utility for maintaining them has been provided.
  • It is now possible to write access and authentication plugins for the broker for providing custom support for authentication against e.g. a SQL database.
  • Implementation of a good test suite which has lead to improved protocol compliance amongst other bug fixes.
  • Masses of bug fixes.

Downloads

Source is available on the download page, the binary packages will follow as soon as possible. Windows and Ubuntu packages are currently available, more to follow.

Changes

The complete list of changes is below:

The broker

  • Add SSL/TLS support.
  • Add TLS-PSK support, providing a simpler encryption method for constrained devices.
  • Passwords are now salted+hashed if compiled with WITH_TLS (recommended).
  • Add mosquitto_passwd for handling password files.
  • Add $SYS/broker/publish/messages/{sent|received} to show the number of PUBLISH messages sent/received.
  • Add $SYS/broker/publish/bytes/{sent|received} to show the number of PUBLISH bytes sent/received.
  • Add reload parameter for security init/cleanup functions.
  • Add option for expiring disconnected persistent clients.
  • Add option for queueing of QoS 0 messages when persistent clients are disconnected.
  • Enforce client id limits in the broker (only when WITH_STRICT_PROTOCOL is defined).
  • Fix reloading of log configuration.
  • Add support for try_private config option for bridge connections.
  • Add support for autosave_on_changes config option.
  • Add support for include_dir config option.
  • Add support for topic remapping.
  • Usernames were being lost when a non clean-session client reconnected, potentially causing problems with ACLs. This has been fixed.
  • Significant improvement to memory handling on Windows.
  • Bridges with outgoing topics will now set the retain flag correctly so that messages will be retained on the remote broker.
  • Incoming bridge connections are now detected by checking if bit 8 of the protocol version number is set. This requires support from the remote broker.
  • Add support for notification_topic option.
  • Add $SYS/broker/subscriptions/count and $SYS/broker/retained messages/count.
  • Add restart_timeout to control the amount of time an automatic bridge will wait before reconnecting.
  • Overlapping subscriptions are now handled properly. Fixes bug #928538.
  • Fix reloading of persistence_file and persistence_location.
  • Fix broker crash on incorrect protocol number.
  • Fix missing COMPAT_ECONNRESET define on Windows.
  • Clients that had disconnected were not always being detected immediately on Linux. This has been fixed.
  • Don't save $SYS messages to the on-disk persistent db. All $SYS messages should be reconstructed on a restart. This means bridge connection notifications will now be correct on a restart.
  • Fix reloading of bridge clients from the persistent db. This means that outgoing bridged topics should always work.
  • Local bridges are now no longer restricted by local ACLs.
  • Discard publish messages with zero length topics.
  • Drop to "mosquitto" user even if no config file specified.
  • Don't incorrectly allow topic access if ACL patterns but no normal ACL rules are defined.

The client libraries

  • Add SSL/TLS support.
  • Add TLS-PSK support, providing a simpler encryption method for constrained devices.
  • Add javascript/websockets client library.
  • Add struct mosquitto *mosq parameter for all callbacks in the client library. This is a binary incompatible change so the soversion of the libraries has been incremented. The new parameter should make it easier to use callbacks in practice.
  • Add mosquitto_want_write() for use when using own select() loop with mosquitto_socket().
  • Add mosquitto_connect_async() to provide a non-blocking connect client call.
  • Add mosquitto_user_data_set() to allow user data pointer to be updated.
  • Add "int rc" parameter to disconnect callback to indicate whether disconnect was unexpected or the result of calling mosquitto_disconnect().
  • Add mosquitto_strerror() for obtaining a string description of error numbers.
  • Add mosquitto_connack_string() for obtaining a string description of MQTT connection results.
  • Add mosquitto_will_clear() and change mosquitto_will_set() to only set the will.
  • Add mosquitto_sub_topic_tokenise() and mosquitto_sub_topic_tokens_free() utility functions to tokenise a subscription/topic string into a string array.
  • Add mosquitto_topic_matches_sub() to check whether a topic matches a subscription.
  • Replaced mosquitto_log_init() with mosquitto_log_callback_set() to allow clients to decide what to do with log messages.
  • Client will now disconnect itself from the broker if it doesn't receive a PINGRESP in the keepalive period after sending a PINGREQ.
  • Client will now send a PINGREQ if it has not received a message from the broker in keepalive seconds.
  • mosquitto_new() will now generate a random client id if the id parameter is NULL.
  • Added max_packets to mosquitto_loop(), mosquitto_loop_read() and mosquitto_loop_write() to control the maximum number of packets that are handled per call.
  • Payload parameters are now void * instead of uint8_t *.
  • The clean_session parameter has been moved from mosquitto_connect() to mosquitto_new() because it is a client parameter rather than a connection parameter.
  • Functions now use int instead of uint*_t where possible.
  • mosquitto_new() now sets errno to indicate failure type.
  • Return MOSQ_ERR_INVAL on zero length topic.
  • Fix automatic client id generation on Windows.
  • mosquitto_loop_misq() can now return MOSQ_ERR_NO_CONN.
  • Compile static library as well as dynamic library with default makefiles.
  • Rename C++ namespace from mosquittopp to mosqpp to remove ambiguity.
  • C++ lib_init(), lib_version() and lib_cleanup() are now in the mosqpp namespace directly, not mosquittopp class members.
  • The Python library is now written in pure Python and so no longer depends on libmosquitto.
  • The Python library includes SSL/TLS support.
  • The Python library should now be compatible with Python 3.

Other

  • Fix db_dump reading of retained messages.
  • Add example of logging all messages to mysql.
  • Add C++ client example.
  • Fix potential buffer overflow in pub/sub clients.
  • Add "make binary" target that doesn't make documents.
  • Add --help arguments to pub/sub clients.
  • Fix building on Solaris.