Homebridge

Homebridge allows you to integrate with smart home devices that do not natively support HomeKit. There are over 2,000 Homebridge plugins supporting thousands of different smart accessories, including Ring, Hue, and SmartThings.

Homebridge is useful for adding devices to your HomeKit network and controlling them from your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or HomePod.

Install Homebridge

The installation process for Homebridge is extremely simple. See the official documentation on how to Install Homebridge on Raspbian for more information.

Add Homebridge Repository

Before getting started, we need to manually add the Homebridge repository so that our Raspberry Pi knows where to get the installation files from. First, add the Homebridge Repository GPG key:

curl -sSfL https://repo.homebridge.io/KEY.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/homebridge.gpg  > /dev/null

Then add the Homebridge Repository to the system sources:

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/homebridge.gpg] https://repo.homebridge.io stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/homebridge.list > /dev/null

Run the Homebridge Installation

Before installation, update your Raspberry Pi's repositories with:

sudo apt-get update

Then install Homebridge with:

sudo apt-get install homebridge

That's it, you're done!

Managing Homebridge and Plugins

Homebridge comes with a fully functional web-based interface for managing the installation, plugins, and much more.

Login to the Homebridge UI

The Homebridge UI web interface will allow you to install, remove and update plugins, and modify the Homebridge config.json as well as manage other aspects of your Homebridge service. Once installation is complete, you'll be shown both the IPv4 and IPv6 URLs to access your Homebridge UI:

Homebridge Installation Complete!
You can access the Homebridge UI via:

* http://192.168.X.X:8581
* http://[XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX]:8581

Thanks for installing Homebridge!

Note To get the IP address of your Homebridge server later, use the command hostname -I

Visiting the URL will prompt you to complete setup by creating a username and password.

After which you'll be taken to the Homebridge dashboard view, where you can see the status of your setup, install plugins, and configure Homebridge further.

Note: If the Homebridge console shows an Failed to check registry.npmjs.org for updates error due to a timeout, it's possible that your Unbound DNS service isn't running. Check that wiki page for more information.

Updating Homebridge

You can update Homebridge and the bundled Node.js runtime by installing the latest version of the Homebridge package using apt. That said, Homebridge can easily be updated directly in the web dashboard with a few clicks.

For handling Homebridge updates on the console, first update repositories:

sudo apt-get update

To install the latest version of the Homebridge package:

sudo apt-get install homebridge

You can also update the bundled Node.js runtime independently by running:

sudo hb-service update-node 

Note: Don't use sudo if you are running the above command from the Homebridge UI Terminal!

Uninstalling Homebridge

To uninstall Homebridge run:

sudo apt-get remove homebridge

Optionally, remove the Homebridge repository:

sudo rm -rf /etc/apt/sources.list.d/homebridge.list

Optionally, to uninstall and remove all plugins and user config run:

sudo apt-get purge homebridge

Note: This will delete /var/lib/homebridge, all of your plugins, and the Homebridge config.