Book Image

Hands-On MQTT Programming with Python

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Hands-On MQTT Programming with Python

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

<p>MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices. This book explores the features of the latest versions of MQTT for IoT and M2M communications, how to use them with Python 3, and allow you to interact with sensors and actuators using Python.</p> <p>The book begins with the specific vocabulary of MQTT and its working modes, followed by installing a Mosquitto MQTT broker. You will use different utilities and diagrams to understand the most important concepts related to MQTT. You will learn to make all the necessary configuration to work with digital certificates for encrypting all data sent between the MQTT clients and the server. You will also work with the different Quality of Service levels and later analyze and compare their overheads.</p> <p>You will write Python 3.x code to control a vehicle with MQTT messages delivered through encrypted connections (TLS 1.2), and learn how leverage your knowledge of the MQTT protocol to build a solution based on requirements. Towards the end, you will write Python code to use the PubNub cloud-based real-time MQTT provider to monitor a surfing competition.</p> <p>In the end, you will have a solution that was built from scratch by analyzing the requirements and then write Python code that will run on water-proof IoT boards connected to multiple sensors in surfboards.</p>
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Creating a certificate for the Mosquitto server

Now that we have a private certificate authority, we can create the certificate for the Mosquitto server, that is, a certificate for the computer that will run the MQTT server.

First, we must generate a new private key that will be different from the private key we generated for our own private certificate authority.

Go to the Terminal in macOS or Linux, or the Command Prompt in Windows. Run the following command to create a 2,048-bit key and save it in the server.key file:

openssl genrsa -out server.key 2048

The following lines show sample output generated by the previous command:

Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
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