Philips Hue Backup Service

This small node application connects to the Philips Hue bridge, gets the current data and dumps it on file. It can be used in conjunction with crontab to create backups periodically.

Note: This project does NOT offer a functionality to restore a backup to a Hue bridge. Creating a backup is merely used for restoring configuration partially using the Hue APIs. It can be helpful for example to restore lost resourcelinks.

📦 Install

To install the package, npm is required. Please make sure first to have node/npm installed. You can get it here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/.

If you have npm up and running, you can install the package globally:

npm install -g hue-backup-service

🚀 Run

To collect a latest backup of the hue bridge, simply run:

hue-backup-service

If this is your first run, follow the steps to authenticate with your Philips Hue bridge.

To get more verbose output, simply add the --verbose flag like so:

hue-backup-service --verbose

⏰ Schedule

You can create a linux cron job to perform backups periodically. To so edit your user's crontab by running the following command:

sudo crontab -e -u $USER

Create a new entry that runs the following command:

hue-backup-service --verbose > ~/.hue-backup-service/cron.log

You can use https://crontab-generator.org to generate the correct syntax for your desired job execution interval.

🛠️ Configure

Only the latest 14 backups are kept to preserve disk space. You can change the number of backups to keep by setting the retentionCount property in the configuration file ~/.hue-backup-service like so:

{
  ...
  "retentionCount": 14
}