paho-mqtt authentication error on pythonanywher - paho

Question

I am trying to publish to an mqtt topic on beebotte.com using a simple publish.single on my linux machine it works fine but on python anywhere I get an authentication error. There are small differences in minor version numbers, can that be what is different?
This is the code I put into the python console:
import paho.mqtt.publish as publish
mqtt_host = "beebotte.com"
mqtt_topic = "climate/set/livingroom"
auth = {'username':"token:MY_SECRET_TOKEN"}
publish.single(mqtt_topic, "python sent", hostname=mqtt_host, auth = auth)
this is the error:
Python 2.7.6 (default, Oct 26 2016, 20:30:19)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import paho.mqtt.publish as publish
>>> mqtt_host = "beebotte.com"
>>> mqtt_topic = "climate/set/livingroom"
>>> auth = {'username':"MY_SECRET_TOKEN"}
>>> publish.single(mqtt_topic, "python sent", hostname=mqtt_host, auth = auth)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/home/<MYUSER>/python-email/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paho/mqtt/publish.py", line 216, in single
protocol, transport)
File "/home/<MYUSER>/python-email/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paho/mqtt/publish.py", line 152, in multiple
client.connect(hostname, port, keepalive)
File "/home/<MYUSER>/python-email/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paho/mqtt/client.py", line 768, in connect
return self.reconnect()
File "/home/<MYUSER>/python-email/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paho/mqtt/client.py", line 895, in reconnect
sock = socket.create_connection((self._host, self._port), source_address=(self._bind_address, 0))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 571, in create_connection
raise err
socket.error: [Errno 111] Connection refused
>>>
>>> exit()
and here it is working:
Python 2.7.13 (default, Nov 24 2017, 17:33:09)
[GCC 6.3.0 20170516] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import paho.mqtt.publish as publish
>>> mqtt_host = "beebotte.com"
>>> mqtt_topic = "climate/set/livingroom"
>>> auth = {'username':"MY_SECRET_TOKEN"}
>>> publish.single(mqtt_topic, "python sent", hostname=mqtt_host, auth = auth)
>>>
>>> exit()
edit (I'm not sure if this is true):
The key is in the actual format of token:token_KxDxlcmXgQBDfWRNC (not real) beebotte.com also accepts a so-called secret key in the format of 2A4Gfgv0puYFBEVbBQX24szALcyDvMRh If I use the secret key it works from pythonanywhere (sometimes). This is leading me to beleive it is some kind of formatting problem with the : in the token.
So the question now is how to format it to work properly.

Answer 1

I don't think mqtt will work from a free account on PythonAnywhere. Free accounts can only connect out through a proxy using http(s) to a specific whitelist of sites. If there's an http to mqtt bridge somewhere, you could possibly use that.