Install HomeBridge on Raspberry Pi - Anthony-Chan/homebridge GitHub Wiki

Running HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi is straightforward. These instructions have been tested on a Raspberry Pi 2 with default Raspbian OS installed via NOOBS, and a Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian Jessie Lite.

For help installing an operating system like NOOBS on your Pi, check the official Raspberry Pi documentation.

After you install the operating system and connect your Pi to your network (and into power), you'll need to locate it so you can ssh into it and run some commands.

The default "Raspbian" OS will automatically broadcast its presence on your network under the mDNS name "raspberrypi". If you are using Mac or Linux, you can reach your Pi easily:

ssh [email protected]

The default username for Raspbian is pi and the password is raspberry.

If you have a different OS installed on your Pi or you can't find it via [email protected] then you can try connecting to your home router by pointing your web browser at somewhere like http://192.168.0.1, http://192.168.1.1, http://10.1.1.1 etc. (this depends on the router you're using and your network setup). Once you are logged in, you can usually find a list of devices connected to your network under "DHCP".

Windows does not support ssh on the command line, but you can use a free SSH client like Putty to connect to your Pi.

Once you're logged into your Pi, you should begin by updating the default system packages (note that these commands may be different if you are not running Raspbian OS).

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

For OSMC or other stripped down Raspberry OS, you may need to install git and make

sudo apt-get install git make

If you are running a version of the Raspbian OS based on Debian Wheezy, it comes with a C++ compiler that is too old for some of the packages Homebridge requires. You'll need to follow these instructions to install an updated version of the C++14 compiler.

You should be able to type:

> g++-4.9 -v
...
gcc version 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10) 

Now you have the needed compiler, but it is not yet set to be the default compiler. You can fix that using the instructions here.

In my case I simply did this:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.9 60 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.9
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.6 40 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.7

You should be able to now type:

> g++ -v
...
gcc version 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10) 

Starting with version 4.0.0, NodeJS now supports ARM-based platforms like Raspberry Pi by default. You can follow the instructions here to get it installed.

Following those instructions explicitly will install version 4.0.0. There are many new versions published since then; to install the latest version (or any other version), modify those instructions with the appropriate directory in the nodejs.org repository.

You can also install the latest version of Node (6.x.x), with these commands:

curl deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install nodejs

This is required by the mdns package in HAP-NodeJS library.

sudo apt-get install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev screen

sudo su -
cd ~
git clone -b smartthings --single-branch https://github.com/Anthony-Chan/homebridge.git
cd homebridge
git submodule init
git submodule update
npm install mdns
cd node_modules/mdns/
npm install
cd ../../lib
rm -rf HAP-NodeJS
git clone https://github.com/KhaosT/HAP-NodeJS.git9
cd HAP-NodeJS
npm install

Now you can simply follow the instructions in the README to install HomeBridge and start it up.

If you would like your Pi to start up Homebridge automatically on reboot, you need to edit the Pi's /etc/rc.local file.

Add this line before the exit 0 line:

su -c "screen -dmS homebridge homebridge" -s /bin/sh pi

If you would like your Pi to start up Homebridge automatically on reboot, you will need to install an "init script". This free init script template is a great place to start.

For example, first go to the raw template file and select the whole page and copy it to your clipboard. Then connect to your pi:

ssh [email protected]
sudo nano /etc/init.d/homebridge
[paste clipboard contents]

Now you'll need to modify the top of the file. Here's an example:

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: homebridge
# Required-Start:    $network $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start daemon at boot time
# Description:       Enable service provided by daemon.
### END INIT INFO

dir="/home/pi"
cmd="DEBUG=* /usr/local/bin/homebridge"
user="pi"

This assumes you have installed Homebridge globally via sudo npm install -g homebridge.

Now type CTRL+o to save, then enter, then CTRL+x to exit. Now change the file permissions and "install" the script:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/homebridge
sudo update-rc.d homebridge defaults

It should now run when your Pi reboots. You can also start it up manually like this:

sudo /etc/init.d/homebridge start

To view the running logs, you can tail the output log or error log:

tail -f /var/log/homebridge.log
tail -f /var/log/homebridge.err

On newer Raspberry Pi and Debian systems, managing of services with init.d is (transparently) replaced with systemd. If you wish to use systemd for running Homebridge on boot, you can find instructions in a Gist under johannrichard/homebridge. As you can see, the service definition is much shorter than a comparable init.d script.

Download the two files and place homebridge under /etc/default and homebridge.service under /etc/systemd/system on your Raspberry Pi.

In order to use the systemd service as is, the following folders and user have to exists:

• A system user named homebridge. You can easily create this user with useradd --system homebridge or choose a different name
• A directory called /var/homebridge, writable by the user created above, and a corresponding config.json file in that directory. Homebridge by default looks for its configuration in /home/<username>/.homebridge. This is unsuitable for services and the -U /var/homebridge flag ensures the config is read from a different place.

Then Enable and run the service (first time) with the following commands:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable homebridge
systemctl start homebridge

You can check the status of the service by calling

systemctl status homebridge

On subsequent reboots, it should start automatically, if not, use the journalctl -u homebridge to check the error cause.

• The service will restart after 10 seconds if it fails for any reason (or if you kill it for example with kill -s SIGSEGV <pid>)