thomasnordquist/mqtt-explorer

An all-round MQTT client that provides a structured topic overview

MQTT Explorer

The App has moved to mqtt-explorer.com

MQTT Explorer is a comprehensive and easy-to-use MQTT Client.
Downloads can be found at the link above.

This page is dedicated to its development. Pull-Requests and error reports are welcome.

Run from sources

npm install -g yarn
yarn
yarn build
yarn start

Develop

Launch Application

npm install -g yarn
yarn
yarn dev

The app directory contains all the rendering logic, the backend directory currently contains the models, tests, connection management, src contains all the electron bindings. mqttjs is used to facilitate communication to MQTT brokers.

Automated Tests

To achieve a reliable product automated tests run regularly on travis.

• Data model
• MQTT integration
• UI-Tests (The demo is a recorded ui test)

Run UI-tests

A mosquitto MQTT broker is required to run the ui-tests.

Run tests with

# Run chromedriver in a separate terminal session
./node_modules/.bin/chromedriver --url-base=wd/hub --port=9515 --verbose

Compile and execute tests

npm run build
node dist/src/spec/webdriverio.js

Write docs

git clone --single-branch -b gh-pages https://github.com/thomasnordquist/MQTT-Explorer.git mqtt-explorer-pages
cd mqtt-explorer-pages
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve --incremental

Readme file: Readme.tpl.md

Preview is available at http://localhost:4000/Readme.tpl

Update docs

npm install
./updateReadme.ts

The readme will be generated from the docs.

License

CC-BY-ND 4.0

The license is a little restrictive to distributing derived work, this may change in the future if the interest arises or more people work on this project.

mqtt-explorer's Issues

Fix linux app icon

Add disconnect & return to connection screen button

Rename arm64 releases

People tend to mistake it for amd64 and may think the app is broken.
The arm64 release has more downloads than anticipated.

Show timestamp of last received message

In system time ?!

Increase resilliance

Under which conditions could the app crash.

• test invalid localStorage data
• Log errors within the renderer process
• Report renderer errors
• Report main process errors

Copy topic to clipboard

"Retained" button looks weird when JSON payload is rendered

Fix sort topic function

Add Amazon MQTT support

Needs certificates, possibly a different mqtt lib.
(amazon examples ship with a working lib)

Show latest value first in history

When you open the history of a value the top of the table is shown with the oldest value.
I would expect to the the most recent values first.

Add navigation via arrow keys

It would be nice to use arrow keys to navigate thou the topics.

Use left,/right to expand/collapse topics

Add drop-down in connect dialog with previous broker successful connections

Please add a drop-down in the connect dialog to be able to select a previous successful connection
Maybe add an alias for each connection to be able to select the relevant broker/connection.

Feature: VSCode extension

First - this tool is amazing, the hierarchical view of MQTT namespace is crazy handy and I've already ditched MQTT Lens and MQTT Spy in favor of this. Thanks!

Anyway, one feature that would be killer would be IDE integration, so one could have a pane open watching traffic and then copy/paste things in and out into your code on the fly. I'm a VS Code fan, and I'm making an assumption that bringing this electron app over in to VSCode (also electron) may be do-able. I've never do-abled anything like that, so I may be completely wrong :P

Thanks again for this awesome tool @thomasnordquist !

MQTT-Subscription failed error

Reduce application size

It appears there are way too much node_modules in the distributed executables.
electron for instance appears to be packed twice.

Side bar update takes makes 50% when root node is selected

due to counting leafes...

Allow empty messages

This is important to clear retained messages.

Question to myself: should cleared topics be still visible in the tree ?
Maybe add a setting in the left sidebar...

Show message QOS

Resizeable sidebar, add draggable handle

Root topic won't expand after it has been collapsed

It appears that somehow the root node won't update at all when collapsed.
Clicking in the body will restart rendering. It also appears to be limted to crowded MQTT servers, where the initial render time is very long.

Pause feature

Windows portable version loads settings but can't write them

Maybe the same issue nucleus had.

Parse JSON array with null element(s)

If I publish the following message, the payload is correctly parsed as a JSON array:

[1,2,3,"a","b","c"]

The following (spec-compliant) payloads will not be shown as JSON arrays:

[1,2,3,,"a","b","c"]
[1,2,3,,"a",,"b","c"]
[1,2,3,,,"a","b","c"]

Please provide builds for download

MQTT-Explorer/build.ts

Line 8 in b44f352

linux: ['snap', 'AppImage', 'deb', 'pacman'],

Please provide those builds for download on GitHub Releases, thank you.

Add root topic subscription QOS ?

Evaluate if this makes sense.

Purge retained topics hierarchy - recursive removal

I would find it very useful to be able to select a 'top' level topic and delete all the retained messages underneath. A bit like selecting the new retained/delete option but higher in the hierarchy.
Otherwise it's a laborious task....

Replace update notification

We currently use the auto-update feature to notify the user if auto-update fails.

It would be better to query the github release API. It is unknown what the behavior of the autoupdater is when updating is not possible.

Fix and rename the leafes() function since it is misleading

Leafes in a tree refer to the outermost nodes.
We use in a context of: give me all nodes with messages attached.

This is not correct and should therefore be fixed.

Affected use cases:

• counting topics
• cloning trees

MQTT broker loading indicator

As you already subscribe to all topics I wonder how easy it would be to provide an indication of the broker loading in messages/min or /sec or similar, maybe a recent historic max figure too ?

It would be a useful indicator to me of the broker usage. It's only a nice to have and I wouldn't want you to impact the overall performance of the application however.

As a related stat it's not possible to get the number of connected clients information is it ? (I believe not)

Add clear button to topic field

Add support to store / select different connections on start

Add graph for history of values

It would be nice if you could open a graph generated with the last received values of a topic.

This would be usefull for debugging sensors like temperature etc.

Just an idea 😉

Add QOS option when publishing

Alerts/Errors while closing app

When closing the window, messages are still sent via the IPC to the window, even though it has already been deallocated.
Fix: close the connection before the window closes

Disable rpm, deb, tar.gz: evaluate upgrade path

Should just be a notification like currently in OSX.
=> Small notification top right corner
=> query github api for last release and offer a link

Debug how much the existing update already tells us about updates on linux.

Fix auto-expand

Disabled can't be set

Add root topic "#" option in connection setup

Add update notification

Show message retention

Add retain and empty payload options to publish

To add the retained option when publishing and also the option to send an empty payload to be able to clear retained messages

Persistent publish history

Add screenshots

Edit: update screenshot
Edit: removed outdated screens
Add os icons from icons8.com/icon/set/apple/color:

the screen stays black or empty

Hello,
does not work for me ...
first you see in the middle a few rotating rings, even after a while the screen stays black ...
0.0.7 portable on Win7 64bit
First I installed the 0.0.5 portable, then the version 0.0.7 via setup and then the version 0.0.7 portable (after uninstalling 0.0.7 via uninstall)

Add option to specify client name in connect dialog

Add a field in the connect dialog to be able to specify a client name.
This should be saved

Add Light/Dark theme switch

I used the theme in most places, evaluate effort. Should be straight forward.

Ask hivemq for mention in their toolbox section

https://www.hivemq.com/mqtt-toolbox/

Switch to yarn

Doesn't connect

Stays on there, doesn't connect

Ubuntu 18.04LTS
Version: MQTT-Explorer-0.0.5-x86_64.AppImage

Copy&Paste in publish topic does not work

Messages are cut off in the tree view.

The tree view is a convenient way to monitor several topics for changes and their respective messages. Unfortunately, the messages are cut off even though there is enough space. See the attached screenshot for reference.

Patrick