Hub “groovy” Code Installation
HousePanel is designed to work with Hubitat, Universal Devices ISY hubs, and Sonos. If you have multiple hubs you can link all of them to your HousePanel setup. For Hubitat hubs, installation begins with installing HousePanel.groovy file into your account. You will find the HousePanel.groovy file in the main hpserver GitHub repository. For Universal Devices ISY you do not need to install anything additional but you need to know the IP address and login credentials for your ISY hub. Same for Sonos.
To install the groovy app into Hubitat, begin by opening the source from GitHub found here.
https://github.com/kewashi/HousePanel/blob/master/HousePanel.groovy
With this file open click on the “raw” icon in the upper right corner. This will open a window showing just the “raw” lines of code. Copy the entire file to the clipboard using Control-A (or Command-A on mac), then Control-C (or Command-C on a mac).
Hubitat Hub Configuration
If you know your Hubitat hub IP, you can log into it directly, or you can locate it by navigating to
https://portal.hubitat.com/
Once you are logged into your hub, select “Apps Code” from the menu on the left. Then click on “New App”. A blank page will open where you paste in the raw source copied above from GitHub using Control-V (or Command-V on a mac). Select save and give it the name HousePanel.
Next click on Apps and select the “Add User App” button in the upper right corner. You should see “HousePanel” on the list. After selecting this option, you can then pick the things in your home to include on your panel.
You must turn on OAUTH for your groovy app. To do this, click the OAUTH button in the upper right corner of the Hubitat IDE page. This will open a window revealing two long strings of data called CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET. These values are important and must be copied and saved for use in the next step when you are configuring the Node.js server.
Multiple Hubs
You can install any number of Hubitat and ISY hubs, and a single Sonos account. This feature is a great way to make a gradual transition from one hub to another. Multiple Hubitat hubs on any account have been tested to work properly.
Node Server Installation
Unlike prior versions of HP, HP V3 only has one viable installation option. The good news is this one and only option is significantly simpler than any of the options available for the original HP version written in PHP. Because HP V3 is written in the modern Node.js language and uses an industry standard SQLite database, installing it on any server platform is basically identical.
I will skip explaining how to set up and configure a standard Linux or Raspberry Pi server. This guide assumes you know how to do this and that you have this already set up. The first step you must take is to confirm that you have NPM and Node.js installed on your server of choice. HP V3 has been installed and tested successfully on a Raspberry Pi, Free BSD Unix, and Windows 10 using Git Bash.
Node.js Installation
HousePanel requires that you have NPM and Node.js both installed. The best place to start for installing both is here:
https://www.npmjs.com/get-npm
Another option for Raspberry Pi users is to log into your rPI using ssh and enter the following commands:
wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb
Another alternative for installing Node.js and NPM are here:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Install-Nodejs-and-Npm-on-Raspberry-Pi/
Regardless of which method you use, you should check to make sure you have Node.js installed properly by running the following commands:
npm -v node -v
This should return NPM version of at least 8 and Node version of at least 16. If not you will need to upgrade.
Installing HousePanel
Installation of HP V2 involves cloning the HP V2 GitHub repository into a sub-folder of your home directory and install the modules using the following commands:
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/kewashi/hpserver.git cd hpserver npm install
If you do not have Git installed, it will also work fine to download the source files from the GitHub website as a zip file or other means. The only important thing to remember is to ensure you keep all files in their respective sub-folders, and that you run “npm install” in the main hpserver directory once the files are in place.
Starting HousePanel V2 Server
Next, you need to launch the HP V2 server in background mode, piping all debug and error outputs to a log file using the following command:
node hpserver.js > hpserver.log &
If you are using Free BSD Linux, you will need to use the daemon service to launch HousePanel as follows:
sudo daemon -o /var/log/hpserver.log node hpserver.js
The server will launch and silently prepare all steps required view your HP dashboard in your browser. The first variant will send any debug output to the file named “hpserver.log” and the second variant will send debug output to the /var/log/hpserver.log file. It is important to note that ANY number of browsers can point to this same server and render HP dashboards, so this is the only server instance you need.
You should now be ready to launch your panel in a browser. Before you do, let’s review a few things to confirm you are ready to go. Before trying HousePanel on your Tablet or Cell phone, confirm that it loads properly in a desktop browser. Using HP on a computer is by far the easiest way to configure your panel anyway, so starting with a PC is a must. HousePanel has been tested with Chrome (on a PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android tablet), Microsoft Edge (on a Windows 10 PC), IE 11 (on a Windows 7 and Windows 10 PC), Safari (on a Mac and iPhone), Silk on an Amazon Fire table, and Fully Kiosk Browser (on PC, an Android tablet, and an Amazon Fire tablet). All have been confirmed to work but others are likely to work as well. Fire tablets work as well if you use the APK to load Fully Kiosk Browser. The Silk browser works but it lacks a full screen mode and videos don’t load properly.
Fully Kiosk, Chrome, and Edge work the best in my experience. Browse to the server that you installed above and use the default port “8580” to display your dashboard. Lets assume your server is at 192.168.1.50, then you would enter:
http://192.168.1.50:8580
The default port of 8580 can be changed by providing a housepanel.cfg file as explained later; however, the server will need to be stopped and restarted for a port change to take effect.
To stop and restart the server, you have to find the process ID for the active server. This is done using the standard Linux/Unix command:
ps aux | grep hpserver | grep -v grep kill -9 <pid> node hpserver.js >& hpserver.log &
where <pid> is the process ID returned by the first statement. For most setups the following variant will do this for you automatically:
hpid=$(ps ax | grep hpserver | grep -v grep | cut -c1-6) kill -9 $hpid node hpserver.js >& hpserver.log &
On Windows in a Git Bash session, the following will usually work:
hpid=$(ps ax | grep nodejs | cut -c4-12) kill -9 $hpid node hpserver.js >& hpserver.log &
Feel free to write your own scripts to stop and/or restart your HousePanel server. You may also want to install it as a service. Instructions for doing this are beyond the scope of this document.