Mosquitto + Node-RED on Ubuntu 24.04

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

Mosquitto + Node-RED - The Classic IoT Stack by cloudimg

Deploy the pairing that virtually every IoT tutorial builds by hand: the Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT message broker and the Node-RED flow based programming tool, on one Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VM, already integrated and proven working the moment it boots.

What This Stack Does

Devices publish telemetry to Mosquitto, the lightweight MQTT broker that is the de facto standard for constrained device messaging. Node-RED subscribes to those topics and lets you transform, route and act on the messages visually: drag nodes onto a canvas, wire them together and click deploy. Node-RED's palette manager connects you to thousands of community nodes for databases, dashboards, cloud services and protocols.

The Integration Is Already Done

Setting these two up together means creating broker credentials, disabling anonymous access, configuring Node-RED's broker connection, securing the editor and testing the chain. This image ships all of that finished:

• Eclipse Mosquitto 2.0.18 on port 1883 with authentication required; anonymous connections are rejected
• Node-RED 5.0.4 on Node.js 22 LTS, run as an unprivileged systemd service bound to loopback
• nginx on port 80 fronting the flow editor with the live editor websocket proxied, plus an unauthenticated health endpoint for probes
• Node-RED's broker connection is pre configured against the local Mosquitto and authenticates with this VM's own generated credentials
• A demo flow ships deployed: publish to topic cloudimg/demo and watch the message arrive in the debug sidebar and in a file sink
• Both licence texts ship in the image under /usr/share/cloudimg/licenses

Secure First Boot: No Default Credentials

At first boot the VM generates a unique broker password for the MQTT user and a unique bcrypt hashed administrator password for the flow editor, writes both to a root only file, and verifies the whole chain end to end by publishing a real message through the broker into the Node-RED flow before the boot is considered complete. The image ships with an empty broker password file (all connections rejected) and an unusable throwaway editor hash, so no working credential ever exists before your VM creates its own.

Getting Started

1. Launch the image on Standard_B2s or larger; allow inbound TCP 22, 80 (editor) and 1883 (MQTT) 2. Read the per VM credentials from /root/mosquitto-node-red-credentials.txt 3. Browse to the VM on port 80 and sign in to the flow editor as admin 4. Point your devices at port 1883 with the broker credentials and build your first flow

Licensing and Pricing

Node-RED is licensed under Apache 2.0. Eclipse Mosquitto is dual licensed EPL 2.0 or EDL 1.0; cloudimg distributes it under the EDL 1.0 (BSD 3 Clause equivalent) licence. Both are free; there is no per seat fee. The cloudimg charge of 0.04 US dollars per vCPU hour covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.

cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email covers deployment, broker configuration and users, flow design, palette nodes, TLS for the editor and for MQTT, upgrades and backups. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Eclipse Foundation, the Mosquitto project or the Node-RED project (an OpenJS Foundation project). All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.