How to Install Mosquitto Broker on Raspberry Pi

This guide explains how to install the Mosquitto Broker for MQTT communication on a Raspberry Pi board.

The broker is primarily responsible for receiving all messages, filtering the messages, decide who is interested in it and then publishing the message to all subscribed clients.

There are several brokers you can use. In our Home Automation projects we use the Mosquitto Broker installed on a Raspberry Pi.

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this tutorial

• You should be familiar with the Raspberry Pi board – read Getting Started with Raspberry Pi;
• You should have the Raspbian or Raspbian Lite operating system installed in your Raspberry Pi – read Installing Raspbian Lite, Enabling and Connecting with SSH;
• You also need the following hardware:
  • Raspberry Pi board – read Best Raspberry Pi Starter Kits
  • MicroSD Card – 16GB Class10
  • Raspberry Pi Power Supply (5V 2.5A)

After having your Raspberry Pi board prepared with Raspbian OS, you can continue with this tutorial. Let’s install the Mosquitto Broker.

Installing Mosquitto Broker on Raspbian OS

Open a new Raspberry Pi terminal window:

To install the Mosquitto Broker enter these next commands:

pi@raspberry:~ $ sudo apt update
pi@raspberry:~ $ sudo apt install -y mosquitto mosquitto-clients

You’ll have to type Y and press Enter to confirm the installation. To make Mosquitto auto start on boot up enter:

pi@raspberry:~ $ sudo systemctl enable mosquitto.service

Testing Installation

Send the command:

pi@raspberry:~ $ mosquitto -v

This returns the Mosquitto version that is currently running in your Raspberry Pi. It should be 1.4.X or above.

Note: sometimes the command mosquitto -v prompts a warning message saying “Error: Address already in use“. That warning message means that your Mosquitto Broker is already running, so don’t worry about that.

Raspberry Pi IP Address

To use Mosquitto broker later on your projects, you’ll need your Raspberry Pi IP address. To retrieve your Raspberry Pi IP address, type the next command in your Terminal window:

pi@raspberry:~ $ hostname -I

In our case, the Raspberry Pi IP address is 192.168.1.144. Save your Raspberry Pi IP address because you’ll need it in future projects.

Testing Mosquitto Broker and MQTT Client

After installing the Mosquitto broker, you should test you installation. You can follow the next tutorial:

• Testing Mosquitto Broker and Client on Raspbbery Pi