Homebridge Http Status Plugin

This is a plugin for Homebridge that exposes a simple web server that could be used to track whether homebridge is running.

This webserver could be used be an external watchdog to take actions, e.g. notify or restart a server.

Setup Development Environment

To develop Homebridge plugins you must have Node.js 12 or later installed, and a modern code editor such as VS Code. This plugin template uses TypeScript to make development easier and comes with pre-configured settings for VS Code and ESLint. If you are using VS Code install these extensions:

• ESLint

Install Development Dependencies

Using a terminal, navigate to the project folder and run this command to install the development dependencies:

npm install

When you are ready to publish the plugin you should set private to false, or remove the attribute entirely.

Build Plugin

TypeScript needs to be compiled into JavaScript before it can run. The following command will compile the contents of your src directory and put the resulting code into the dist folder.

npm run build

Link To Homebridge

Run this command so your global install of Homebridge can discover the plugin in your development environment:

npm link

You can now start Homebridge, use the -D flag so you can see debug log messages in your plugin:

homebridge -D

Watch For Changes and Build Automatically

If you want to have your code compile automatically as you make changes, and restart Homebridge automatically between changes you can run:

npm run watch

This will launch an instance of Homebridge in debug mode which will restart every time you make a change to the source code. It will load the config stored in the default location under ~/.homebridge. You may need to stop other running instances of Homebridge while using this command to prevent conflicts. You can adjust the Homebridge startup command in the nodemon.json file.

Versioning Your Plugin

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, such as 1.4.3, increment the:

1. MAJOR version when you make breaking changes to your plugin,
2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards compatible manner, and
3. PATCH version when you make backwards compatible bug fixes.

You can use the npm version command to help you with this:

# major update / breaking changes
npm version major

# minor update / new features
npm version update

# patch / bugfixes
npm version patch

Publish Package

When you are ready to publish your plugin to npm, make sure you have removed the private attribute from the package.json file then run:

npm publish

If you are publishing a scoped plugin, i.e. @username/homebridge-xxx you will need to add --access=public to command the first time you publish.

Publishing Beta Versions

You can publish beta versions of your plugin for other users to test before you release it to everyone.

# create a new pre-release version (eg. 2.1.0-beta.1)
npm version prepatch --preid beta

# publsh to @beta
npm publish --tag=beta

Users can then install the beta version by appending @beta to the install command, for example:

sudo npm install -g homebridge-example-plugin@beta