Including Homebridge in HBB Ideas

Ok, so there are a couple of things already in the works for the next update. One is that Homebridge and Homebridge-Indigo will be part of the plugin, thus taking care of the need to install anything on your computer. Second, the aforementioned installation will allow for multiple installations on a single computer, eliminating the need to support running HB on remote computers entirely since this now sufficiently addresses the 100 device limit. The other new feature will be the ability to add your own platforms and/or accessories to each server instance for those cases where you are using additional HB plugins other than HB-Indigo and HB-Camera-FFMpeg (camera is also included in the default build).

Why? For one, and this has always been an important part of getting this finished, there needs to be a really simple way for new folks to get Homebridge up and running without dropping to a shell and installing it all by hand, this takes care of it. Also, until now if you wanted to break the 100 device limit you had to run HB on different computers, each computer giving you another 100 devices - now one computer can support ALL of your devices. Finally, I believe there is a necessity to be able to manipulate the config.json as you need in order to support your other plugins and there's no way I'm going to build in support for 400 (and growing) currently available NPM plugins!

Everyone currently running HBB has the "original" installation of Homebridge, that is that they followed Webdecks instructions to get it up and running. New users will just default to using the built-in HBB version of Homebridge (which is identical by the way to what you have now).

I have all sorts of ways to go on this and am curious what the community preferences are in regards to this new version of HBB that has HB in it - migrate the current HB config into the new one, run both side-by-side, ability to use the old version and ignore the new one... What would you like to see?

I'm very partial to letting HBB do it all and willing to restart my setup to get it to do it. Mainly due to my complete failure to get Homebridge-iTunes to work at all after following the instructions before HBB.

I'm always for the cleanest development path, even if it means a one-time pain for the end user. So for that reason, I'd vote for whichever results in the best code, in the shortest amount of time, even if it causes me to have to recreate my HBB config.

HB-Itunes dons't work, it actually breaks HB right now. I tried to incorporate that into the build but I couldn't get it working either. I may actually dig into the plugin itself and try to fix the problem but that won't be in this release anyway.

I'm always for the cleanest development path, even if it means a one-time pain for the end user. So for that reason, I'd vote for whichever results in the best code, in the shortest amount of time, even if it causes me to have to recreate my HBB config.

That is PRECISELY how I feel generally as well, and since each of these three options takes varying levels of extra coding I'm putting it out here before I force the world to conform to my coding

Even back in my punch card computing days, it was clear that being legacy-bound was an impediment to good coding. I've already erased and restarted my homebridge as I've learned about nodejs by trail and error. A well integrated plug-in will help newbies and old guys like me who are happy to make fewer trips down to the basement to reset the server.


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I've been pulling my hair out trying to update HB. With HBB, anything with an option that would automatically uninstall the old stuff and reinstall the new stuff would be awesome.


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Do whatever is the best longterm solution. Device setup isn't all that difficult and I'm certainly willing to do a "big bang" at least once.

Happy to start a fresh as I never could get my head round the shell and startup script would welcome a plugin to take care of it

Ps happy to try a beta version as I'm not currently relying on Homebridge

Thank you all for your input, that seems pretty clear cut to me and it's the way I preferred to go as well. I understand the desire to support legacy versions of software but this is not actually "released" as it's considered release candidate status, and there won't be any loss of your existing configuration - in fact you won't really notice that it got changed over, so why not?

Well, as it turns out both the groups of folks get what they want . It has been surprisingly complicated getting things updated so I may not make this week, but may still make the end of the weekend.

The way the next version will work is that there will be TWO servers, the build-in HB that 99% of users will be just fine with and then a "custom" one, this is the one you have been using up to this point. The built-in is purely for HB-Indigo and may incorporate some other plugins later if I can get them to play nicely (i.e., Homebridge-Camera does NOT play nicely and will never work in the built-in setup) while the ~/.homebridge will be for folks that want to do something a little extra with their setup (i.e., iTunes, Nest, etc) until there may be official support in the plugin.

The reason for this is that you will be unable to get some plugins to play with the now all-in-one solution and I'm not going to leave people high and dry, so HBB will support the ~/.homebridge as it always has but only as a custom source for advanced users. The HB-Camera device I added will only write to the custom config, as will other add-ons I don't directly support in the build but have devices for in the plugin.

Oh, and I've decided that how I utilize the custom device will change in that anything you hand-add to the custom server will survive HBB configuration saves. So if you put in the iTunes or Nest plugin information but use HBB to manage the rest (i.e., ports, names, HB-Camera, etc) then HBB will keep all your custom stuff intact. This will be good news for those of you wanting to use other plugins but can't because HBB rewrites the entire config each time.

It's coming together pretty slick, really. For new users to HB it will auto setup the server for them and they will be ready to go, HB 100% done and ready when they start the plugin the first time. I'm working now on taking that a step further and auto-discovering every type of device so it is all categorized for them as switches, dimmers, locks, etc. I'm also thinking of adding a "wizard" that will automatically create additional servers for people with more than 99 devices to link to HomeKit.

So, that's where things are now. I'm about 85% done with the update, a few loose ends that take time to wrap up.

Damn, this post ended up being much longer than anticipated .

Wow, nice. Sounds like HBB will do everything for me except set the background pictures in the Home app.


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Sounds great! Excited to try it.

Wow, nice. Sounds like HBB will do everything for me except set the background pictures in the Home app.

I wish it could also assign devices to rooms, but to the best of my knowledge homebridge can't do that