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The Eclipse IoT MQTT Sandbox Is On the Move!

Friday, July 5, 2019 - 09:36 by Frédéric Desbiens
For many years, the Eclipse Foundation has offered an MQTT sandbox to the IoT developer community. That sandbox was maintained by Foundation staff and was running on Foundation infrastructure. The goal was to encourage and facilitate the evaluation of Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto, and to foster interoperability among MQTT implementations. Today, I have the pleasure to announce the deployment of a new community-run MQTT sandbox to replace it.

What will change? — In a user perspective, just the domain name. The old sandbox was available at iot.eclipse.org. The new one will be available at mqtt.eclipse.org. As before, port 1883 will be used for standard connections and port 8883 for connections over TLS.

What will happen — For the time being, the DNS record for mqtt.eclipse.org points to the old sandbox. On July 16 2019 at 10:00 EDT, the IT team will switch that DNS record to the new one.

The admins for the new sandbox will only be able to generate the digital certificates for TLS connections after the DNS switch. This means connections over TLS will fail initially, but should be working after a short time.

The old sanbox will stay up for the time being, but will be turned off on August 2, 2019.

Why are we doing this? — The Foundation’s IT team is very small. By reducing their workload, we aim to help them to deliver other services to the Eclipse community more effectively. Moreover, the new sandbox will be run by the Eclipse Mosquitto team, which means you will get the benefits of the latest releases faster than before.

What you should do — Simply edit your connections to use mqtt.eclipse.org! It’s that easy.


I would like to thank Ian Craggs and Roger Light, respectively project leads for Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto, for supporting this change. Your dedication to open source preserved an important asset for our community.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions or concerns.