Hi everyone, I’m trying to build a small sensor-to-Discourse integration: like having motion sensors or temperature sensors publish data to a Discourse topic (or trigger a post/private message) when certain thresholds are crossed. I was inspired by this article on using ESP32 + MQTT for motion detection and email alerts: https://www.theengineeringprojects.com/2022/03/iot-based-motion-detection-with-email-alert-using-esp32.html I also looked at Discourse’s webhook and plugin APIs, and a few community threads on MQTT bridges with Discourse. I’m curious: what’s the easiest way to send external IoT data into Discourse in a clean, minimal way (without building a full plugin)? Any known lightweight approaches or example setups people have used?

Your best bet is Use scoped API Keys Once you have a key, you can make requests to Discourse that create posts from whatever platform/language you like on your IoT setup. Sounds like a cool project, good luck!

It occurs to me you could also just have your IoT send an email to Discourse. [image] Configuring incoming email to create new topics or group messages Site Management bookmark This guide explains how to configure Discourse to create new topics or group messages from incoming emails. It covers site settings, group configuration, and category settings. person_raising_hand Required user level: Administrator Configure incoming email to create new topics or group messages Discourse allows you to send emails to a special address to automatically create new topics in a category or new group messages. This feature is useful for integrating Discourse with ext…

Simple sensor-driven notifications in Discourse via Webhooks or MQTT?

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tobiaseigen (Tobias Eigen) October 2, 2025, 1:17pm 3

Hi Aria! This looks interesting. Were you able to get it working?

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Simple sensor-driven notifications in Discourse via Webhooks or MQTT?

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