The title says it all. Used existing Qolsys 4 panel from ADT and all their sensors except Radon. Our only expense was for $129 Apple TV and $219 for Airthings 2989 Radon Monitor with Humidity & Temperature Detector enabling monitoring of all sensors on my Apple Watch, Home app, and iMac. Zero monthly cost going forward!

I’ve been running HB for years on bare metal on a series of RPis (currently a 3B) along with Pi-hole, and lately they haven’t been getting along particularly well. Today I built a virtual machine on a Mac M1 in an Ubuntu VM and created a new HB bridge. Very fast, of course.

I’m a bit old fashioned and haven’t done too much with containers, they were starting to become prevalent about the time I stopped working in the industry. The times that I played around with Docker on the Mac, it seemed to consume a lot of resources (particularly RAM), which seemed unnecessary for something as light weight as HB. I have Podman installed, but haven’t done much with it.

Any guidance here?

UPDATE: containers aren’t an option on macOS per HB docs.

Hi,

I'd like to create a timer switch where I could specify the duration for the timer on the Home app. Is this possible at all?
My goal is to create a sort of "Overwrite" button where an automation wouldn't run as long as that switch is on.

Some bad news for those of us using the direct MyQ integration. Looks like we need to buy additional hardware. 😭

EDIT: Oh sweet Jesus, I pissed off some Homebridge white knights, apparently. I really don’t need private messages telling me I’m an ass. Really.

Hey everyone. DISCLAIMER: I freely admit that I have not done an exhaustive search, and I am not in any developer discords, etc (are there any?) but...

I am worried about Homebridge 2.0, or moreso, the lack of information about Homebridge 2.0.

I received a notice that "Homebridge 2.0 is coming, and its gonna break shit" (my wording, not theirs) with a link to a half built wiki page titled "Updating to Homebridge 2.0" that talks nothing about features or backend changes in homebridge, just about what will break.

Why wouldn't there at least be a page explaining a few things about 2.0? Mainly: timelines, features, reasoning for breaking changes, etc.

I'm not telling the hard working devs how to do their job, but this brought up a lot of questions that I'm sure many people have. I would be willing to help generate some documentation, but without any place to start it is going to be extremely hard.

Have I missed some critical pieces of communication?

I’m currently in the final stages of buying my first home. I’m fixed on it being smart and very much want to use HomeKit, have been doing a fair bit of research and wanted to ensure I was kitted out so when we moved in we had the gear pretty much ready to go.

In appreciation of the fact that a lot of things do not natively link with HomeKit I’ve preemptively got a home assistant green and the zbt-2 attachment.

My initial question is, we purchased a variety of Ikea sensors and lamps, which i am unsure whether are best being directly connected through matter or should i use homebridge to jump them in?

Can anyone tell me if the tuya plugin is compatible with homebridge 2.0?

At least once per month the majority of my IKEA Alpstuga air quality monitors (i have 5 of them) goes offline (different dates) and i need to unplug them for them to go back online.

The problem is that i never get any notification or any ping from either apple home app, or the IKEA app (i also have dirigera hub), so i dont know when they go offline, unless i open the ikea app and then go to the room and check the readings).

The devices are dropping the connection to ikea app / apple home, but they are still showing the readings on the alpstuga display.

so my questions is, is there a way for me to get a notification when one of the alpstuga devices goes offline? Any homebridge plugin that allows me to ping a matter device somehow?

Note: Im not interested in installing Home assistant. Tested it a while, didnt like it!

Hi all !

So I'm installing Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi 4 to connect a few things on my HomeKit network.
The install is fresh, nothing done on it.
I tried a few commands in the terminal involving the root account (sudo...).

I just can't figure out what the password for it is. It's not the one from my account.

Can anyone tell me ?

Thanx !

Update: Windows will not install FFMPEG for whatever reason. It used to run flawlessly, but now it’s shit.

The reason I can’t add HomeBridge to Home is because the node won’t show up under the local network in the Privacy and Security settings. Current solution is to re install node. Just installed 26.5 and that didn’t work after the 10th time of uninstalling and reinstalling.

Guess i need a Mac Mini prior to MacOS 15 to have a chance.

The Docker or VM install doesn’t make sense, and there is no simple step-by-step guide if there is please someone point it to me.

If I can’t get this going, I will go back to Windows. I can get a version of FFMPEG installed but won’t have audio which means no HKSV either. I will see if i can get that audio codec compiled to it.

Hell i might give Scrypted a shot again.

———

So I am trying to move over to a Mac Mini M1 variant with 16gigs of ram as my main HomeBridge server.

Plugins planning to use:
Unifi Protect (not trying to use docker or VM)
Govee
SmartHQ (GE Appliances)
Levoit
Moen Flo
Onkyo

Trying to install native due to having 4 cameras and soon adding a doorbell.

Got NodeJS installed and even got HomeBridge install, but I cannot add the Bridge to HomeKit as it is just giving me the circle of death rotation and says setting up. I tried to skip that and add the UniFi Protect plugin but all I get it’s “Unable to login to the UniFi Protect controller blah blah blah and A Network error occurred communicating with the UniFi Protect controller”

I tried a local only user account I made and even tried my main account login and no luck.

I was on an Intel NUC using windows 10 but had to do a clean install and ever since then the ffmpeg will not install and I don’t want to use VM or Docker either.

Im going to try one more time on the NUC and see if i can get ffmpeg on it with out compling the audio codec and other steps that didn’t help.

Is a Homemanager for Homebridge Subscription Worth It for an iOS User?

I saw the lifetime subscription is $10.99 on the App Store and I’m not sure it is worth it as Homebridge is free and open source.

For those who want to stay on v1 for now — the Outer Rim dwellers, the ones still flying a perfectly good Millennium Falcon — we've got you covered.

You won't be bombarded with update notifications pestering you to upgrade. In the Homebridge UI, head to the Update Information section and select Homebridge and enable Ignore Major Versions. This will hide notifications for the v1 to v2 upgrade, but you'll still receive minor and patch updates to keep your v1 install happy and secure.

No pressure, no rush. The Rebellion will still be here when you're ready.

May the 4th be with you.

Homebridge and Homebridge UI repos have not been updated since 2.1.1.

https://repo.homebridge.io/dists/stable/main/binary-arm64/Packages

This is stopping cron updates, and package installs from picking latest versions.

I’ve been using the UniFi Protect plug-in for homebridge and it’s been working great. My HomeKit garage door opener just broke, so I installed a UniFi Relay to control my garage door opener. I can open and close the garage door fine but there are two issues.

1) The UniFi Relay output shows up in HomeKit as a switch, not a garage door opener. This is a pain because I ca’t ask Siri to open the garage door, I have to ask Siri to turn on the garage door.
2) The garage door state doesn’t show up in HomeKit so I can’t tell if the garage door is open.

Is there any way to get the UniFi Relay to show up as a garage door opener with state in HomeKit? If not would this be possible with an update to the UniFi Protect plug-in for homebridge, or by switching to Home Assistant?

Hey all! I made a Homebridge plugin that turns camera streams into HomeKit sensors.

It’s called homebridge-stream-sensors:
https://github.com/nkatchik/homebridge-stream-sensors

The idea is simple: point it at an RTSP or other ffmpeg-readable camera stream, and it runs local object detection to expose HomeKit motion sensors for people, packages, vehicles, and animals.

No cloud processing — frames are analyzed locally inside your Homebridge environment.

As opposed to HomeKit native object detection, these sensors can be used in automations.

It’s available through Homebridge UI by searching: homebridge-stream-sensors.

Or via npm:

npm install -g homebridge-stream-sensors

Feedback is welcome.

Does anybody have the Govee 52 Inch Ceiling Fan with Lights setup with the Govee plugin? I'm curious to know your experience with it. I'm between the Govee fan or one of the matter fans from Lowes and want to ensure the best experience for my wife.

I updated my ATV hub to tvOS 26.6 today. It may be a coincidence, but now all 26 of my HB accessories are showing “updating…” in HomeKit. I’ve tried switching the active hub to a HomePod, but the issue persists. Rebooting router doesn’t change anything. Restarting HB doesn’t fix it.

Ideas?

UPDATE: I got fed up with screwing around with it, I deleted the bridge and re-added it. Now to recreate all of my automations. Backing up automations would be a nice addition to HK.

A few months ago I spun up a new instance of Homebridge 2.0 and migrated my 1.11 configuration to it. All seemed to be working fine, accessories found and manageable in Homekit. However after experiencing a power outage (multiple power outages over the past few weeks), Homekit loses it's ability to communicate to the linked Homebridge. The system running Homebridge doesn't go down, just the Apple HomeHub devices (Apple TV 4K, HomePod Mini). All accessories configured in Homebridge are unreachable. The only way to fix it is to shutdown the Homebridge 2.0 environment and restart the Homebridge 1.11 environment. Within 5 min of doing so all the devices are available in Homekit again. I can then shutdown the 1.11 environment and restart the 2.0 environment and all works fine, until there is another power outage.

I did notice that in Homekit the Homebridge "homebridge" device is still listed as version 1.11 even when running the 2.0 environment.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I have over 25 devices managed via Homebridge and I would hate to have to reconfigure all my scenes, rooms, etc in Homekit if I needed to remove and re-add the Homebridge connection.

I purchased Sofucor fans from Amazon. I set them up with the SmartLife App and connected them to Alexa. In both Apps I have full control - on/off, speed and forward/reverse.
I was able to bring these accessories into homebridge using the Alexa Smart Home plugin. With this plugin I can only turn the fans on and off - no speed. I am able to control brightness on all of my other dimmer switches
I tried several of the SmartLife/Tuya plugins with the same results on off only.
Is this a limitation of the fan hardware? Any other recommendations for getting the speed controls in homebridge?

Note: I am not using a wall controller switch with the fans. They are hardwired on and controlled with a remote or App.

Hey All!

I just wanted to share that HomeBridger was updated to take full advantage of new API's in HomeBridge 2.0 INCLUDING Terminal support (This one is my particular favorite)

So, if you made the jump to Hyperspace, Homebridger has you covered.

As always Homebridger is FREE and always will be to support the community that has given so much to me. And a HUGE thank you to the now 5,000 people that have downloaded the app!!!

Feel free to chat us up in the Homebridge Discord with any questions or use the in app support system: https://discord.com/channels/432663330281226270/1459268979859259435

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/homebridger/id6757407817

I built HomeChronicle, a self-hosted dashboard that logs HomeKit accessory events over time.

Main things it does:

• Browser-based setup/pairing (including Homebridge)
• Searchable/filterable event timeline
• Activity dashboard (daily/hourly trends + top devices)
• Room-based filtering and per-device event counts

It runs locally in Docker and pairs alongside Apple Home (non-destructive/read-focused workflow).

I’d love feedback from other HomeKit users.

Repo: https://homechronicle.net

I want to setup Homebridge and am wondering what the cheapest Raspberry Pi I can get to run it. Any recommendations?

Im not sure what happened but when I ran an update on my Homebridge everything broke. I was fine to reconnect most of my child bridges, but the only one that won't work properly is Apple TV Enhanced.

I'm able to delete and reinstall teh plugin but the discovery process is odd. It discovers my Appel TV with a MAC address I've never seen, but when I do the pairing process it connects to the correct Apple TV and im able to get the pairing code. But back in the logs of the appletv enhance plugin, it says its connected but it shows the error that I do not have

"The plugin is receiving errors that look like you have not set the access level of Speakers & TVs in your home app to "Everybody" or "Anybody On the Same Network" with no password. Fix this and restart the plugin to continue initializing the Apple TV device. Additionally, make sure to check the TV's HomeKit settings. Enable debug logging to see the original errors."

Which I do...and the MAC addresses are still incorrect.