Mosquito Requirements

[turboc1208]

I have HomeAssistant running on a headless server. I want to setup monitor on some RPI-zero's around the house, much like the HA example in the documentation. My question is, do I need Mosquitto installed on all the RPI's or just on the man HA server and will HA's MQTT integration provide that for me?

[MrEbbinghaus]

Mosquitto is the broker. ("The brain")
You only need to run it once.

[turboc1208]

Mosquito is the broker. It listens for and forwards messages to MQTT clients which are normally built into the device. You configure the device with the address of your broker so the device knows who to send to or register subscriptions with.

[MrEbbinghaus]

So, to answer your questions:

• You need only one broker. (It could run anywhere.)
• The HA MQTT integration is only a client, not a broker.
• You can add the Mosquitto Add-on to your HomeAssistant, that starts and manages the Mosquitto broker automatically.
• monitor is a MQTT client, that connects to that broker.