SparkStreaming, RabbitMQ and MQTT in python using pika

Just to make things tricky, I'd like to consume messages from the rabbitMQ queue. Now I know there is a plugin for MQTT on rabbit (https://www.rabbitmq.com/mqtt.html).

However I cannot seem to make an example work where Spark consumes a message that has been produced from pika.

For example I am using the simple wordcount.py program here (https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.2.0/streaming-programming-guide.html) to see if I can I see a message producer in the following way:

import sys
import pika
import json
import future
import pprofile

def sendJson(json):

  connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters(host='localhost'))
  channel = connection.channel()

  channel.queue_declare(queue='analytics', durable=True)
  channel.queue_bind(exchange='analytics_exchange',
                       queue='analytics')

  channel.basic_publish(exchange='analytics_exchange', routing_key='analytics',body=json)
  connection.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
  with open(sys.argv[1],'r') as json_file:
    sendJson(json_file.read())

The sparkstreaming consumer is the following:

import sys
import operator

from pyspark import SparkContext
from pyspark.streaming import StreamingContext
from pyspark.streaming.mqtt import MQTTUtils

sc = SparkContext(appName="SS")
sc.setLogLevel("ERROR")
ssc = StreamingContext(sc, 1)
ssc.checkpoint("checkpoint")
#ssc.setLogLevel("ERROR")


#RabbitMQ

"""EXCHANGE = 'analytics_exchange'
EXCHANGE_TYPE = 'direct'
QUEUE = 'analytics'
ROUTING_KEY = 'analytics'
RESPONSE_ROUTING_KEY = 'analytics-response'
"""


brokerUrl = "localhost:5672" # "tcp://iot.eclipse.org:1883"
topic = "analytics"

mqttStream = MQTTUtils.createStream(ssc, brokerUrl, topic)
#dummy functions - nothing interesting...
words = mqttStream.flatMap(lambda line: line.split(" "))
pairs = words.map(lambda word: (word, 1))
wordCounts = pairs.reduceByKey(lambda x, y: x + y)

wordCounts.pprint()
ssc.start()
ssc.awaitTermination()

However unlike the simple wordcount example, I cannot get this to work and get the following error:

16/06/16 17:41:35 ERROR Executor: Exception in task 0.0 in stage 7.0 (TID 8)
java.lang.NullPointerException
    at org.eclipse.paho.client.mqttv3.MqttConnectOptions.validateURI(MqttConnectOptions.java:457)
    at org.eclipse.paho.client.mqttv3.MqttAsyncClient.<init>(MqttAsyncClient.java:273)

So my questions are, what should be the settings in terms of MQTTUtils.createStream(ssc, brokerUrl, topic) to listen into the queue and whether there are any more fuller examples and how these map onto those of rabbitMQ.

I am running my consumer code with: ./bin/spark-submit ../../bb/code/skunkworks/sparkMQTTRabbit.py