Homebridge Node Red Platform Plugin

This plugin embeds a Node Red instance into your Homebridge system. Node Red is an excellent tool for adding automations to your Homebridge system. Adding Node Red into Homebridge simplifies total management efforts compared to running Node Red separate. In order to ease the integration between Node Red flows and Homebridge accessories, the component node-red-contrib-homebridge-automation is preinstalled. This makes it possible to have the accessory services turn up as nodes into the Node Red flows.

The plugin automatically creates a hb-conf configuration node that represents the local Homebridge system, so you are ready to define nodes representing the local Homebridge accessories.

The plugin requires no configuration, but if you would like to change the http port of the Node Red server (default port number 1956) you could easily change that via the plugin's configuration UI in the Homebridge UI.

The Node Red Editor is available at http://homebridge_server_host:1956/red , where 1956 must be changed in case you have configured another port number.

The Node Red system does not use a settings.js file, instead some primary settings are hardcoded into the plugin. Arbitrary settings (see a settings.js file) may be added via the plugin's configuration. Each setting has a name, which corresponds to property names in settings.js. Each setting also has a value. These values are identical to the values described in settings.js. These values are javascript values and the setting value to enter is a JSON representation of the value. String values, must be enclosed in double-quote characters. Since object property names are represented as strings in JSON, these must also be enclosed in double-quotes. The use of double-quote characters should be applied in case you enter the vales using the plugin's configuration UI. In case you edit the config.json directly, all JSON double-quote characters have to be escaped (prepended) by a backslash ('\') character. If you enter double-quotes in the plugin's UI, you could then have a look at the config.json and you should then see that the double-quotes has been escaped.

        {
            "name": "Node Red Platform",
            "port": 1956,
            "settings": [
                {
                    "name": "credentialSecret",
                    "value": "\"hemligt\""
                }
            ],
            "platform": "NodeRedHomebridgePlugin"
        }

Here is another example where we add a setting with a more complex value. This setting will require users to login with a username/password, in this case admin/admin.

        {
            "name": "Node Red Platform",
            "port": 1956,
            "settings": [
                {
                    "name": "credentialSecret",
                    "value": "\"hemligt\""
                },
                {
                    "name": "adminAuth",
                    "value": "{\"type\":\"credentials\",\"users\":[{\"username\":\"admin\",\"password\":\"$2a$08$1TnXg7/EOueefHkimDFcdOuWG8r7RgaLO7MaxpH9D4F/FfFGgZolW\",\"permissions\":\"*\"}]}"
                }
            ],
            "platform": "NodeRedHomebridgePlugin"
        }

Information about the adminAuth setting is available here. On that page you can also find information on how to create the password hashes that needs to be entered in the configuration. One of the mentioned methods is to use node with the bcryptjs package and this could easily be done using the Homebridge terminal window. Open the terminal from the Homebridge UI and run the following commands:

npm install bcryptjs
node -e "console.log(require('bcryptjs').hashSync(process.argv[1], 8));" your-password-here