Postman now supports MQTT

Jonathan Haviv

September 15, 2023· 3 mins

We’re excited to announce that MQTT support in Postman is now in open beta. MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight communication protocol designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). It enables devices to exchange data efficiently by subscribing to specific “topics” and publishing messages to those topics. MQTT is ideal for IoT applications like home automation, industrial monitoring, weather stations, and vehicle telemetry. It excels in low-bandwidth, real-time, and low-power scenarios.

MQTT is the first of many IoT protocols like AMQP and CoAP to come to Postman. It is popular among builders working with IoTs, and our users have been asking for it for a while now. Our support for MQTT is informed by this enthusiasm and our takeaways from the experience of building for other asynchronous API technologies like WebSocket and SocketIO.

Here are some of the things you can now do with this exciting v1 release:

• Test your MQTT API by connecting to the service, subscribing to topics, and publishing messages with ease.

• Get a comprehensive view of the received telemetry data with real-time response visualization.

• Leverage support for SSL authentication and uploading your own CA and self-signed certificates.

• Work with a wide range of MQTT features with support for MQTT v5 and v3.1.1.

• Leverage support for MQTT over WebSocket.

• Test Plaintext, JSON, Base64, and Hex payloads.

• Save your MQTT request into a collection to reuse, document, and share with your teammates.

Real-time data visualization

One of the prominent features introduced in our Postman’s MQTT support is the ability to view the telemetry data in a more readable fashion with visualization. As you receive data, you can see visualizations on your subscribed topics. No additional configuration is needed beyond subscribing to topics. This helps understand data trends from sensors or ensure that different MQTT-enabled sources publish events to topics as expected. This is a very powerful feature, making the API response easier to read and understand. Stay tuned for more updates because we plan to make this available for other protocols supported by Postman in the future.

You can choose which fields to visualize for a given topic and change their visualization type to suit your needs. Each topic gets its own visualization window that can be hidden if you’re not currently using it, so you can focus on what is most important to you.

How to get started with MQTT in Postman

We designed the MQTT client in Postman to give power users the tools they need to debug their MQTT APIs, but also made it simple enough so that if you’re new to MQTT, you can dive right in. Our focus is to get you working with MQTT with the least amount of resistance.

1. In the left-hand sidebar, click New.

2. Select MQTT.

3. Type the address of your MQTT Broker into the URL bar.

4. If needed, update the version to v3.1.1 or v5 (default).

5. Click Connect.

6. Start publishing messages or click the Topic tab to subscribe to relevant topics.

Learn more about what you can do with Postman’s MQTT support in our Learning Center here.

What’s next

We’re continuing our plan to expand support for more MQTT features across the specification and bring many Postman features you have come to expect—like using scripts, additional auth options, saved examples, and more. Your input and feedback will be critical as we continue to improve throughout the beta. Try it out for yourself and leave us feedback in a comment below.

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