Connecting to mosquitto server from Intel Edison board

Question

I am trying to connect to Mosquitto server installed locally by running the below script on Intel Edison board -

var client = mqtt.connect("ws://localhost:9001");

client.on('connect', () => {  
    console.log("connected");
})

But the connect event or the log is never called. Please note that when I try to call this from a webpage using -

var client = new Paho.MQTT.Client("localhost", 9001, "clientId");
client.connect(options);

This works.

The problem is connecting from the edison board. Did anyone face this issue?

Answer 1

As thrashed out in the comments,

The broker is not running on the Edison, so you can not use localhost as the host in the URL. localhost is the built in name for the loopback interface so always points to machine the code is running on.

You need to use the IP address of the machine (the laptop) where the broker is running.

If you are running all this in a environment with dynamic IP provisioning then you want to look at something called mDNS/Avahi which allows machines on the same subnet to be addressed by broadcast hostnames in the .local domain. That or move the broker to a machine with a static IP address and a DNS entry.