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Eclipse IoT

Tutorial: Connecting Eclipse Kura to AWS IoT

Just a few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that they added the ability for their customers to manage IoT solutions. More specifically, they are offering a managed IoT platform that allows to connect your devices using HTTP or MQTT, and that integrates with other AWS services to simplify things like message processing, persistence in S3 or DynamoDB, … you name it! And of course, this is meant to scale to billions of devices, although I have to admit I have not tested that just yet 🙂

In this article, I will show you how you can connect your Eclipse Kura gateway to AWS IoT. Since the authorization and overall security mechanisms in AWS IoT heavily rely on certificates, the only tricky bit will be for us to properly configure the Kura gateway so as it establishes a trusted connection to the AWS backend.

Categories
Eclipse IoT

How to run your web server and MQTT WebSockets broker on the same port

I was just asked how one can deploy a similar setup as the iot.eclipse.org MQTT sandbox, where MQTT over WebSockets is available on port 80, just like the rest of the website.

There are actually two ways of achieving this.

Mosquitto as the main frontend

It’s a little-known fact but together with built-in WebSockets support (added in version 1.4), Mosquitto also can act as basic HTTP server, and directly serve a bunch of static resources for you. The config option you’re looking for is “http_dir“, that will allow you to serve the content of a directory over HTTP.

Granted you are running a version of Mosquitto that has WebSockets support, here how your mosquitto.conf file should look like to enable WebSockets *and* regular HTTP connections:

listener 80
protocol websockets
http_dir /home/johndoe/htdocs

Of course, you will need to make sure that you do not have any other daemons (like Apache, nginx, …) already running and using port 80 🙂

Once Mosquitto is setup this way, you can use any MQTT client that supports WebSockets to connect to ws://yourhost URI.

[info]ws://yourhost/ws, or ws://yourhost:80/foobar would work just fine too – Mosquitto doesn’t care about the path at all![/info]

Apache front-end + mod_websocket_mosquitto

Since it’s likely you actually want a “real” HTTP server to serve your website (for security reasons, for being able to run PHP, etc.), another approach is to use Apache as the main HTTP front-end, as you would normally do, and configure it to tunnel WebSockets connections made on a given URI to your Mosquitto broker.

You can download an Apache module that does exactly that at https://github.com/willem4ever/mod_websocket_mosquitto. The instructions to compile and install it are pretty straightforward and you will end up with something like the following in your Apache configuration:

<IfModule mod_websocket.c>
Loadmodule mod_websocket_mosquitto /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_websocket_mosquitto.so
 <Location /mosquitto>
 MosBroker localhost
 MosPort 1883
 SetHandler websocket-handler
 WebSocketHandler /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_websocket_mosquitto.so mosquitto_init
 </Location>
</IfModule>
Categories
Eclipse IoT

Unveiling the Eclipse IoT Demo Box

Now that the holiday season is over, we’re fully into “conference season” mode, as the fall is packed with IoT conferences (look at our Events Calendar to see where we will have a presence in the next couple months). Last week, the Eclipse Foundation was exhibiting at M2M Summit with three of our member companies: Logi.cals, Generative Software and Bitreactive (who blogged about it).

Since the number of Eclipse IoT projects keeps growing (we’re approaching 20!), it is sometimes difficult for people to quickly understand the problems each of these projects are trying to solve. While we’ve been pretty successful with the “Greenhouse demo™” over the past few years, this is a rather limited use case, and it does not really allow to showcase some of our newest projects.

This is why I started to create a new setup for Eclipse IoT demos, that I hope will be adopted by everyone interested in having an easy to setup platform for explaining what Eclipse IoT is all about. You should read this article until the end if you want to learn how to replicate this setup yourself!