Sparkplug Awareness

The Sparkplug specification version 3.0 has certain requirements of an MQTT broker to be usable for Sparkplug.

The first category is "Sparkplug Compliance", which means that the broker supports basic MQTT features. Any MQTT compliant broker should also be Sparkplug compliant.

The second category is "Sparkplug Aware", which requires that certain Sparkplug messages are automatically republished by the broker on a different topic. This relates to all NBIRTH and DBIRTH messages, and provides a mechanism to have a persistent store of birth certificates.

More specifically, all messages published matching the topic spBv1.0/+/NBIRTH/+ or spBv1.0/+/DBIRTH/+/+ will be republished on the same topic, but prefixed with $sparkplug/certificates/. In other words, a message published on spBv1.0/group_id/NBIRTH/edge_node_id would be republished on $sparkplug/certificates/spBv1.0/group_id/NBIRTH/edge_node_id

Sparkplug awareness would not be part of a standard MQTT broker and is typically provided as an extension.

Mosquitto is Sparkplug compliant out of the box without any configuration.

For Sparkplug awareness support, Mosquitto provides a plugin.

Plugin Activation

To enable the plugin it must be loaded into the broker with, by adding the following to your mosquitto.conf:

global_plugin /usr/lib/mosquitto_sparkplug_aware.so

There is no further configuration required.