Overview

A note from the author: Sorry for the lack of updates since 2021! I originally built this library for my graduation project when I was very new to programming. Today, with a deeper understanding and far better tools, I've finally come back to fix everything and transform this into the library it was always meant to be. Thank you for your patience!

This library is focused in help you to connect, publish and subscribe to a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) in ReactJS with the power of React Hooks.

🚀 Version 3.0.0 - Major Architecture Rewrite!

Version 3.0.0 introduces a globally scalable SubscriptionManager multiplexer.

• Zero Event Duplication: Calling useSubscription inside multiple nested components no longer spawns duplicate client.on('message') listeners. Everything routes perfectly through a single Singleton-Context listener.
• Intelligent Reference Counting: The broker only .subscribes over the network on the first mount. When the very last matching hook unmounts, it safely triggers .unsubscribe().
• Pre-Hydrated Cache: If a sensor event occurs and a React hook mounts a few seconds later, it instantly loads the cached payload.
• Upgraded Core: Powered natively by the highly robust latest mqtt v5 implementation.

Installation

Just add mqtt-react-hooks and mqtt to your project:

npm add mqtt-react-hooks mqtt

Exported Hooks

• useMqttState -> returns { connectionStatus, client, message }
• useSubscription(topic: string | string[], options?: {} ) -> returns { client, topic, message, connectionStatus }

Usage

Similarly to react-redux, you must first wrap your application (or subtree) with a <Connector> which will initialize the internal Mqtt Client instance and Subscription Multiplexer.

Root component

The only required prop is brokerUrl. Additional options follow the standard mqtt.Client#connect schema.

import React from 'react';
import { Connector } from 'mqtt-react-hooks';
import Status from './Status';

export default function App() {
  return (
    <Connector brokerUrl="wss://test.mosquitto.org:8081/mqtt">
      <Status />
    </Connector>
  );
}

Connection Status

Use useMqttState to universally extract the internal connection variables safely without subscribing to topics.

import React from 'react';
import { useMqttState } from 'mqtt-react-hooks';

export default function Status() {
  /*
   * Status strings:
   * - Connecting
   * - Connected
   * - Reconnecting
   * - Offline
   * - Error
   */
  const { connectionStatus } = useMqttState();

  return <h1>{`Status: ${connectionStatus}`}</h1>;
}

Subscribing to Overlapping Topics

Multiple components can subscribe directly to arrays or exact wildcard filters independently without clashing.

import React from 'react';
import { useSubscription } from 'mqtt-react-hooks';

export default function RoomGauges() {
  /* Message structure:
   *  topic: string
   *  message: string (or Buffer depending on parser)
   */
  const { message } = useSubscription([
    'room/livingroom/temperature',
    'room/kitchen/temperature',
  ]);

  return (
    <div>
      <span>Latest Update: {message?.topic}</span>
      <h2>{message?.message}°C</h2>
    </div>
  );
}

Publishing Messages

You don't need a topic subscription if you just want to publish! You can use useMqttState (or pass an empty array to useSubscription([])) to just grab the raw client object:

import React from 'react';
import { useSubscription } from 'mqtt-react-hooks';

export default function SwitchButton() {
  const { client } = useSubscription([]);

  function handleClick() {
    client?.publish('room/livingroom/lights', 'OFF');
  }

  return (
    <button type="button" onClick={handleClick}>
      Disable Lights
    </button>
  );
}

Tips

Bundler Troubleshooting (Vite / Webpack)

If your specific bundler configuration struggles to resolve Node-specific modules (like Buffer or process) natively, or if you run into strict ESM resolution errors, check out the MQTT.js Bundle documentation. MQTT.js provides pre-built browser-optimized distributions (e.g., mqtt/dist/mqtt.min) which you can alias or import directly if needed.

Contributing

Thanks for being interested on making this package better. We encourage everyone to help improving this project with some new features, bug fixes and performance issues. Please take a little bit of your time to read our guides, so this process can be faster and easier.

License

MIT ©