Magistrala

A Modern IoT Platform Framework for Scalable IoT

Made with ❤ by Abstract Machines

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Introduction 🌍

Magistrala is an open-source IoT platform built for engineers who need full control over their messaging, device management, and data pipelines.

It is built on top of FluxMQ, a modern message broker designed for both messaging and event streams. Magistrala provides everything around it: identity, access control, device provisioning, data processing, and observability.

IoT systems usually involve brokers, databases, rule engines, and custom services. Magistrala does not pretend those pieces disappear. It provides a coherent framework for integrating them into a single system with a consistent model for identity, access control, messaging, and observability.

What it is:

• An event-driven IoT middleware platform
• A unified control plane for devices, users, and data
• A foundation for building scalable IoT systems

What it is not:

• Not just an MQTT broker
• Not a black-box SaaS
• Not tied to a single cloud or vendor

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🧩 IoT Platform Framework

We call Magistrala a framework, not just a platform.

It is extremely flexible and lets you build systems the way you want — from simple prototypes to complex, large-scale deployments — without forcing you into rigid patterns.

At the same time, it avoids the typical complexity of many IoT platforms, where you need to learn an entirely new set of concepts before you can even get started.

Magistrala is built around a small number of main concepts:

• users
• clients (devices)
• channels
• messages
• policies

Most engineers are already familiar with these ideas, so you can start building immediately.

You can keep things simple:

• connect devices
• send messages
• store data

Or you can go deeper:

• define complex access control policies
• build event-driven pipelines
• integrate custom processing and automation

Magistrala scales with your needs — simple when you want it, powerful when you need it.

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🚀 Key Benefits

• A Coherent System, Not a Mess of Integrations Build IoT systems from multiple components without ending up with fragmented security, messaging, and operations.

• Event-Driven at the Core Everything is built around events — enabling real-time processing, streaming, and scalable data flows.

• Protocol-Native, Not Forced Abstractions MQTT, HTTP, WebSocket, and CoAP are treated as first-class citizens, each with their own semantics.

• Security Built Into the Model Identity, authentication, and authorization are part of the system design — not bolted on later.

• Flexible by Design Start simple or build complex systems — without changing platforms or rewriting your architecture.

• Runs Where You Need It Cloud, edge, or hybrid — no vendor lock-in, no hidden dependencies.

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✨ Features

Magistrala provides a complete set of building blocks for IoT systems — from device connectivity to data processing and observability — without forcing a rigid architecture.

🔐 Identity & Access

• Multi-tenant domains for isolating environments
• Users, roles, and organizational hierarchies
• Fine-grained access control (ABAC + RBAC)
• Mutual TLS (X.509) and JWT-based authentication
• Personal Access Tokens (PATs) with scoping and revocation

🔌 Connectivity

• Native support for MQTT, HTTP, WebSocket, and CoAP
• Consistent authentication and authorization across protocols
• Designed for both cloud services and constrained devices

📦 Device & Application Model

• Device (client) provisioning and lifecycle management
• Channels for grouping and controlling message flow
• Application-level grouping and sharing of clients
• Simple but flexible communication model

⚙️ Processing & Automation

• Rules engine for message processing and routing (Enterprise Edition)
• Alarms and triggers for reacting to events (Enterprise Edition)
• Scheduled actions for time-based workflows
• Event-driven architecture as the foundation

📊 Observability

• Audit logs for tracking system activity (Enterprise Edition)
• Metrics and tracing via Prometheus and OpenTelemetry
• Built-in visibility into system behavior and data flows

🚀 Deployment & Operations

• Container-native (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Designed for cloud, edge, and hybrid deployments
• Works with external storage and processing systems
• Scales from small setups to production environments

🧑‍💻 Developer Experience

• CLI and SDKs for fast integration
• Straightforward APIs and concepts
• Documentation focused on getting you running quickly

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Atom Integration Model

Magistrala uses Atom as the backend for identity, authorization, and the catalog.

Atom is the source of truth for:

• domains
• users
• clients
• channels
• groups
• roles
• access policies

Magistrala services such as rules, alarms, and reports remain Magistrala services, but they use Atom for identity and authorization.

Current Docker deployments use the Atom image configured by ATOM_IMAGE in docker/.env. For compatibility with the current Magistrala integration, the generated MG_ATOM_TOKEN_* service credentials are unscoped Atom access tokens. Scoped Atom access tokens should not be used for these service env vars until Magistrala stops using owner-wide Atom listing APIs such as authorizedObjectIds in service policy paths.

Core Entity Mapping

Magistrala concept	Atom concept	Meaning
Domain	Tenant	Isolation boundary for one organization, project, or environment
User	Entity with kind human	A person who logs in and uses the UI/API
Client	Entity with kind device	A device or application that sends/receives data
Channel	Resource with kind channel	A messaging/data path that clients can publish or subscribe to
Group	Group	A collection of users, clients, channels, or other grouped objects

In simple terms:

MG Domain  = Atom Tenant
MG User    = Atom Human Entity
MG Client  = Atom Device Entity
MG Channel = Atom Channel Resource
MG Group   = Atom Group

Actions, Permission Blocks, Roles, and Assignments

Atom access control has these basic parts:

Atom word	Simple meaning	Example
Action	One permission verb	read, write, delete, role.manage, policy.manage
Permission Block	Where actions apply	all channels in domain d1 can read, publish
Role	A bundle of permission blocks	tenant-admin bundles domain, role, and member access
Role Assignment	Who gets a role	give user1 the tenant-admin role

Read an assignment like this:

Give <who> this <role>.
The role contains permission blocks that say where and what.

Example:

Give user1 the tenant-admin role on domain d1.

That means:

user1 can use the tenant-admin permissions inside domain d1.

How MG Roles Work With Atom

MG UI shows actions such as:

• read
• update
• delete
• manage roles
• add/remove members
• publish
• subscribe

These are mapped to Atom actions:

MG action	Atom action
view/read	read
create/update/edit/connect	write
delete/remove	delete
manage roles	role.manage
add/remove members or access	policy.manage
channel publish	publish
channel subscribe	subscribe

So when MG UI checks:

Can user1 manage roles for client1?

Atom checks:

Does user1 have role.manage on client1, or on the domain that contains client1?

When MG UI checks:

Can user1 add a member to channel1?

Atom checks:

Does user1 have policy.manage on channel1, or on the domain that contains channel1?

Practical Rule

If a user is domain admin, they usually receive a tenant-scoped role in Atom.

That tenant-scoped role can allow them to manage objects inside the domain:

• clients
• channels
• groups
• rules
• alarms
• reports

For narrower access, create object-scoped roles. For example:

Give user2 a reader role only on channel1.

Then user2 can read only that channel, not the whole domain.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/absmach/magistrala.git
cd magistrala
make provision_atom_tokens
make run_latest

A fresh clone carries no generated secrets. Two sets have to exist before the stack can start — certificates and keys the internal services authenticate with, and the Atom service tokens each service presents to Atom. make run_latest produces the first set itself but expects the second to be there already, which is why the token step comes first above.

Certificates, broker secret and trace key

Generated by make run_latest, or on demand:

make check_certs

This creates whatever is missing and leaves anything already present alone:

Path	What it is
docker/ssl/certs/fluxmq-service-server.{crt,key}	Server certificate for FluxMQ's mTLS service listener
docker/ssl/certs/re-fluxmq-client.{crt,key}	Client certificate whose URI SAN identifies the Rules Engine
docker/ssl/certs/timescale-writer-fluxmq-client.{crt,key}	Client certificate whose URI SAN identifies the Timescale writer
docker/ssl/certs/postgres-writer-fluxmq-client.{crt,key}	Client certificate whose URI SAN identifies the Postgres writer
docker/ssl/certs/fluxmq-auth-fluxmq-client.{crt,key}	Client certificate whose URI SAN identifies the publish proxy
docker/fluxmq/secrets/re-current	Rules Engine principal secret, from MG_RE_BROKER_SECRET
docker/fluxmq/secrets/timescale-writer-current	Timescale writer secret, from MG_TIMESCALE_WRITER_BROKER_SECRET
docker/fluxmq/secrets/postgres-writer-current	Postgres writer secret, from MG_POSTGRES_WRITER_BROKER_SECRET
docker/fluxmq/secrets/fluxmq-auth-current	Publish proxy secret, from MG_FLUXMQ_BROKER_SECRET
docker/re/secrets/trace.key	HMAC key the Rules Engine signs its loop-detection traces with

Internal services reach the broker as local principals rather than as ordinary clients: each presents a client certificate whose URI SAN names it, plus a SASL secret, and the broker grants it only what it needs — the Rules Engine consumes m, republishes under it, and feeds the writers and alarms streams; the writers only subscribe to writers; the publish proxy that serves the UI's HTTP publish endpoint only publishes under m.. The principals are declared in docker/fluxmq/node{1,2,3}.yaml, and adding a service means adding an entry there alongside its certificate and secret.

Being a local principal is also what preserves a message's origin. The broker stamps its own transport protocol and identity on anything published over a connection it does not trust, so a message relayed to the writers over the plain AMQP listener would be stored as protocol: amqp with the relaying service as its publisher. A service-role principal on the mTLS listener may state the origin instead, and the protocol the device actually published with survives to the database.

The certificates are issued by the development CA committed at docker/ssl/certs/ca.crt, so no extra setup is needed for a local run. The generated material is gitignored.

The server certificate is issued for fluxmq and fluxmq-node{1,2,3}, which covers both this Compose stack and a single-node deployment. Point any MG_*_BROKER_URL at a host outside that set and the service fails its TLS verification with certificate is valid for ...; add the name to FLUXMQ_SERVICE_SERVER_CERT_CONFIG in docker/ssl/Makefile and reissue:

rm -f docker/ssl/certs/fluxmq-service-server.* \
  docker/ssl/certs/re-fluxmq-client.* \
  docker/ssl/certs/timescale-writer-fluxmq-client.* \
  docker/ssl/certs/postgres-writer-fluxmq-client.*
make -C docker/ssl fluxmq_service_certs

make check_certs skips certificates that already exist, so stale certificates have to be removed rather than merely re-running the target.

Each local-principal secret must stay equal to the corresponding value in docker/.env; a mismatch fails that service's broker authentication. After changing one, re-run its target:

Variable	Target
MG_RE_BROKER_SECRET	fluxmq_service_secret
MG_TIMESCALE_WRITER_BROKER_SECRET	timescale_writer_fluxmq_service_secret
MG_POSTGRES_WRITER_BROKER_SECRET	postgres_writer_fluxmq_service_secret
MG_FLUXMQ_BROKER_SECRET	fluxmq_auth_fluxmq_service_secret

trace.key is created once and preserved on later runs — replacing it while messages are in flight would invalidate the rule traces they already carry, so delete it only deliberately. Every Rules Engine replica must read the same key.

Start the stack through make run_latest rather than calling docker compose up directly. Compose creates a missing bind-mount source as an empty directory, so bringing up re or fluxmq before these files exist leaves the containers failing against a directory where they expect a key.

Atom service tokens

Not generated automatically, because provisioning them starts Atom and runs a bootstrap job against it:

make provision_atom_tokens

This brings up Atom, runs atom-bootstrap, and writes the gitignored docker/.env.tokens with one service token per consumer — MG_ATOM_TOKEN_FLUXMQ_AUTH, MG_ATOM_TOKEN_FLUXMQ_NODE{1,2,3}, MG_ATOM_TOKEN_RE, MG_ATOM_TOKEN_ALARMS, MG_ATOM_TOKEN_REPORTS, MG_ATOM_TOKEN_TIMESCALE_READER, and MG_ATOM_TOKEN_POSTGRES_READER.

make run_latest refuses to start when that file is absent or short of any of those variables, and names what is missing. To fold the step into the run:

make run_latest PROVISION_ATOM_TOKENS=true

Re-run provision_atom_tokens after anything that resets Atom's database; the old tokens do not survive it.

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Usage

make cli
./build/cli health <service>

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License

Apache-2.0