Eclipse Paho MQTT Rust Client Library

This repository contains the source code for the Eclipse Paho MQTT Rust client library on memory-managed operating systems such as Linux/Posix, Mac, and Windows.

The Rust crate is a safe wrapper around the Paho C Library.

Most development and deployment has being done on Linux. Please let us know about any success or failure on other systems.

Features

The initial version of this crate is a wrapper for the Paho C library, similar to the implementation for the current Paho C++ library. It targets MQTT v3.1 and 3.1.1, and includes all of the features available in the C library for those versions, including:

• Network Transports:
  • Standard TCP support
  • SSL / TLS
  • WebSockets
• QoS 0, 1, and 2
• Last Will and Testament (LWT)
• Message Persistence
  • File or memory persistence
  • User-defined persistence (including example for Redis)
• Automatic Reconnect
• Offline Buffering
• High Availability
• Several API's:
  • Rust Futures and Streams for asynchronous operations.
  • Traditional asynchronous (token/wait) API
  • Synchronous/blocking API

Supports Paho C v1.3.1

Latest News

To keep up with the latest announcements for this project, follow:

Twitter: @eclipsepaho and @fmpagliughi

EMail: Eclipse Paho Mailing List

Mattermost: Eclipse Mattermost Paho Channel

New Features in v0.6

The v0.6 release added support for Futures and cleaned up the internal implementation of the library.

• Futures support:

  • Compatible with the Rust Futures library v0.1
  • Now depends on the crates "futures" (v0.1) and "futures-timer" (v0.1).
  • The Token objects, which are returned by asynchronous calls, now implements the Futures trait, which is mostly compatible with the previous implementation.
  • Incoming messages can be obtained through a Stream from the client, implemented with a futures channel.
  • New examples of a publisher and subscriber implemented with futures.

• Server Responses

  • There are now several different types of tokens corresponding to different requests for which the server can return a response: ConnectToken, DeliveryToken, SubscribeToken, etc.
  • Tokens now track the type of request and get the server response upon completion. This is the Futures Item type for the token.
  • In particular this is useful for connecting subscribers. The app can now determine if a persistent session is already present, and only needs to subscribe if not.

• Send and Sync Traits

  • The clients are now marked as Send and Sync
  • The Token types are Send
  • Most of the option types are Send and Sync
  • AsyncClient and Token objects are now just Arc wrappers around inner structs making it easy to clone and pass references around.

• Internal Cleanup

  • Updated to wrap Paho C v1.3.1 which has a number of important bug fixes.
  • Moved Tokens into their own source file.
  • Consolidated persistence internals into UserPersistence struct.
  • Created a new ResponseOptions struct to manage the details of the C MQTTAsync_responseOptions objects.
  • Cleanup of the AsyncClient implementation.
  • A bad reconnect bug is fixed (Issue #33)

Upcoming Release(s)

The next major release will bring in support for MQTT v5.

Building the Crate

The library is a standard Rust "crate" using the Cargo build tool. It uses the standard cargo commands for building:

$ cargo build

Builds the library, and also builds the -sys subcrate and the bundled Paho C library. It includes SSL, as it is defined as a default feature.

$ cargo build --examples

Builds the library and sample applications in the examples subdirectory.

$ cargo test

Builds and runs the unit tests.

$ cargo doc

Generates reference documentation.

The Paho C Library and paho-mqtt-sys

The Paho Rust crate is a wrapper around the Paho C library. This version is specifically matched to Paho C v 1.3.x, and is currently using version 1.3.1. It will generally not build against newer versions of the C library, as the C lib expands functionality by extending structures, thus breaking the Rust build.

The project includes a Rust -sys crate, called paho-mqtt-sys, which provides unsafe bindings to the C library. The repository contains a Git submodule pointing to the specific version of the C library that the Rust crate requires, and by default, it will automatically build and link to that library, using pre-generated C bindings that are also included in the repo.

When building, the user has several options:

• Build the bundled library using the pre-generated bindings and SSL (default).
• Build the bundled library, but regenerate the bindings at build time.
• Use an external library, with the location specified by environment variables, generating the bindings at build time.
• Use the pre-installed library with the pre-generated bindings.

These are chosen with cargo features, explained below.

Building the bundled Paho C library

This is the default:

$ cargo build

This will initialize and update the C library sources from Git, then use the cmake crate to build the static version of the C library, and link it in. By default, the build will use the pre-generated bindings in bindings/bindings_paho_mqtt_X_Y_Z.rs, where X_Y_Z is the currently supported library version.

The defalut features for the build are: ["bundled", "ssl"]

When building the bundled libraries, the bindings can also be regenerated at build-time. This is especially useful when building on uncommon/untested platforms to ensure proper bindings for that system. This is done adding the "build_bindgen" feature:

$ cargo build --features "build_bindgen"

In this case it will generate bindings based on the header files in the bundled C repository.

The cached versions of the bindings were created on an x86_64 PC running Linux. When compiling on a different machine or cross-compiling, it is recommended to use "build_bindgen" to regenerate the bindings for that target.

Building the Paho C library without SSL/TLS

The crate can build the bundled Paho C library without secure sockets:

$ cargo build --no-default-features --features "bundled"

Linking to an exteral Paho C library

The crate can generate bindings to a copy of the Paho C library in a different location in the local file system, and link to that library.

$ cargo build --no-default-features --features "build_bindgen,ssl"

The "ssl" feature can be omitted if it is not desired.

The location of the C library is specified through an environment variable:

PAHO_MQTT_C_DIR= ...path to install directory...

It's assumed that the headers are in an include/ directory below the one specified, and the library is in lib/ under it. This would be the case with a normal install.

Alternately, this can be expressed with individual environment variables for each of the header and library directories:

PAHO_MQTT_C_INCLUDE_DIR= ...path to headers...
PAHO_MQTT_C_LIB_DIR= ...path to library...

In this case, the headers and library can be found independently. This was necessary when building against a development tree for Paho C that used GNU Make build. This doesn't seem as necessary now that CMake is used everywhere.

Linking to an installed Paho C library

If the correct version of the Paho C library is expected to be installed on the target system, the simplest solution is to use the pre-generated bindings and specify a link to the shared paho C library.

$ cargo build --no-default-features --features "ssl"

This is especially useful in a production environment where the system is well controlled, such as when working with full-system build tools like yocto or buildroot. It could be easier to build or cross-compile the packages separately.

Again, the "ssl" feature can be omitted if it is not desired.

This option should be used with caution when building an application that will ship independetly of the target system, since it assumes a very specific version of the C library and will fail if that is not the one on the target.

Bindgen linker issue

As described above, the crate can optionally use the Rust bindgen library to create the bindings to the Paho C library.

https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-bindgen/

Bindgen requires a relatively recent version of the Clang library installed on the system - recommended v3.9 or later. The bindgen dependencies seem, however, to seek out the oldest Clang version if multiple ones are installed on the system. On Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04, the Clang v3.6 default might give some problems, although as the Paho builder is currently configured, it should work.

But the safest thing would be to set the LIBCLANG_PATH environment variable to point to a supported version, like:

export LIBCLANG_PATH=/usr/lib/llvm-3.9/lib

Cross-Compiling

I was pleasently surprised to discover that the cmake crate automatically handles cross-compiling libraries. You'll need a C cross-compiler installed on your system. See here for more info about cross-compiling Rust, in general:

https://github.com/japaric/rust-cross

For example, to do a full build for ARMv7, which includes Raspberry Pi's, BeagleBones, UDOO Neo's, and lots of other ARM maker boards:

$ cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --examples

This builds the main crate, the -sys crate, and it cross-compiles the Paho C library. It uses SSL, so it requires you to have a version of the SSL development library installed with the cross-compiler.

If you don't have SSL for the cross-compiler

$ cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --no-default-features \
    --features="bundled" --examples

Logging

The Rust library uses the log crate to output debug and trace information. Applications can choose to use one of the available logger implementations or define one of their own. More information is available at:

https://docs.rs/log/0.4.0/log/

The sample applications use the enviroment log crate, env_logger to configure output via the RUST_LOG environment variable. To use this, the following call is specified in the samples before using any of the Rust MQTT API:

env_logger::init().unwrap();

And then the library will output information as defined by the environment. Use like:

$ RUST_LOG=debug ./async_publish
DEBUG:paho_mqtt::async_client: Creating client with persistence: 0, 0x0
DEBUG:paho_mqtt::async_client: AsyncClient handle: 0x7f9ae2eab004
DEBUG:paho_mqtt::async_client: Connecting handle: 0x7f9ae2eab004
...

In addition, the underlying Paho C library has its own logging capabilities which can be used to trace network and protocol transactions. It is configured by the environment variables MQTT_C_CLIENT_TRACE and MQTT_C_CLIENT_TRACE_LEVEL. The former names the log file, with the special value "ON" to log to stdout. The latter specifies one of the levels: ERROR, PROTOCOL, MINIMUM, MEDIUM and MAXIMUM.

export MQTT_C_CLIENT_TRACE=ON
export MQTT_C_CLIENT_TRACE_LEVEL=PROTOCOL

Example

Several small sample applications can be found in the examples directory. Here is what a small MQTT publisher might look like:

use std::process;

extern crate paho_mqtt as mqtt;

fn main() {
    // Create a client & define connect options
    let cli = mqtt::Client::new("tcp://localhost:1883").unwrap_or_else(|err| {
        println!("Error creating the client: {:?}", err);
        process::exit(1);
    });

    let conn_opts = mqtt::ConnectOptionsBuilder::new()
        .keep_alive_interval(Duration::from_secs(20))
        .clean_session(true)
        .finalize();

    // Connect and wait for it to complete or fail
    if let Err(e) = cli.connect(conn_opts).wait() {
        println!("Unable to connect:\n\t{:?}", e);
        process::exit(1);
    }

    // Create a message and publish it
    let msg = mqtt::Message::new("test", "Hello world!");
    let tok = cli.publish(msg);

    if let Err(e) = tok.wait() {
        println!("Error sending message: {:?}", e);
    }

    // Disconnect from the broker
    let tok = cli.disconnect();
    tok.wait().unwrap();
}

External Libraries and Utilities

Several external projects are under development which use or enhance the Paho MQTT Rust library. These can be used in a system with the Rust library or serve as further examples of it's use.

Redis Persistence

The mqtt-redis create allows the use of Redis as a persistence store. It also provides a good example of creating a user-defined persistence which implements the ClientPersistence trait. It can be found at:

https://github.com/fpagliughi/mqtt.rust.redis