Homebridge Raspberry Pi

Start Homebridge on boot of Raspberry Pi

I am actually documenting this for my own purposes; however, if anyone stumbles across this and can benefit… Great!

Quick Links

Installing Raspbian
Installing Homebridge
Loading Homebridge on boot

Installing Raspbian

The first thing I did was obtain the latest copy of Raspbian from…

Downloads

I then followed the instructions in the video below. The video shows both an older Pi and an older version of Raspbian; however, the same steps can be followed but I skipped the step about creating the SSH file because the newer version will ask you if you want SSH access during the install process.

Installing Homebridge

I had success following the instructions at…

Loading Homebridge on boot

The video below got me 99% of the way; however, there was one missing step which I have outlined below the video link.

Although following the video above worked to load Homebridge on boot, it loaded it as the “root” user and not the “pi” user which I had earlier configured Homebridge as. Thanks to a little help from this link, I learned I needed to add User=pi to the [Service] section. My homebridge.service file ended up looking like…

[Unit]
Description=Homebridge

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/homebridge
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target