As an openHABian end user, please check out the official openHAB documentation:
Setting up a fully working Linux system with all needed packages and openHAB recommendations is a boring task taking quite some time and Linux newcomers shouldn't worry about these technical details.
A home automation enthusiast doesn't have to be a Linux enthusiast!
openHABian aims to provide a self-configuring Linux system setup specific to the needs of every openHAB user.
The project provides two things:
- a set of scripts to set up openHAB on any Debian based system (Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu)
- a complete SD-card image pre-configured with openHAB and many other openHAB- and Hardware-specific preparations for all Raspberry Pi models.
As of openHABian version 1.5 of the image, all Raspberry Pi models are supported as hardware. Anything x86 based may work or not. Anything else ARM based such as ODroids, OrangePis and the like may work or not. NAS servers such as QNAP and Synology boxes will not work. Support for PINEA64 was also dropped in this current release. We strongly recommend that users choose Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4 systems to have 1 GB of RAM or more. RPi 1 and 0/0W only have a single CPU core and 512 MB. This can be sufficient to run a smallish openHAB setup, but it will not be enough to run a full-blown system with many bindings and memory consuming openHABian features/components such as ZRAM, InfluxDB or Grafana.
We do not actively prohibit installation on any hardware, including unsupported systems, but we might skip or deny to install specific extensions such as those memory hungry features named above.
Supporting hardware means testing every single patch and every release. There are simply too many SBC and HW combinations that maintainers do not have available, or, even if they did, the time to spend on the testing efforts that is required to make openHABian a reliable system. Let's make sure you understand the implications of these statements: it means that to run hardware other than RPi 2/3/4 or x86 is not fully supported.
For ARM hardware that we don't support, check out the fake hardware parameters. There's a good chance it'll work out for you. If that still doesn't work for you, give Ubuntu or ARMbian a try. But remember if you hit any problem related to memory or hardware, you'll be on your own. You are expected not to raise these problems as issues on the community forum or on GitHub, please. Feel encouraged to report any success stories, though.
Going beyond what the RPi image provides, as a manually installed set of scripts, we support running openHABian on all Debian like Linux distributions such as Ubuntu on x86 hardware.
Our recommendation is to install Raspberry Pi OS lite on ARM or generic Debian or Ubuntu on x86. This is what we support and test openHABian against.
If you choose not to use the image, we expect you to use the stable distribution that openHABian testing is based on, 'buster' for Raspberry Pi OS (ARM) and Debian (x86) that is. To install openHABian on anything older or newer may work or not. If you encounter issues, you may need to upgrade first or to live with the consequences of running an OS on the edge of software development.
Either way, please note that you're on your own when it comes to configuring and installing the HW with the proper OS yourself.
Although RPi3 and 4 have a 64 bit processor, you cannot run openHAB in 64 bit. The Azul Java Virtual Machine we currently use is incompatible with the aarch64 ARM architecture. In general you should be aware that to run in 64 bit has a major drawback, increased memory usage, that is not a good idea on a heavily memory constrained platform like a RPi. Also remember openHABian makes use of Raspberry Pi OS which today still is a 32 bit OS.
We are closely observing development and will adapt openHABian once it will reliably work on 64 bit. So things may change in the future, but for the time being, you should not manually enforce to install a 64 bit JVM.
On x86 hardware, 64 bit is the standard.
Please check the official documentation article to learn about openHABian and please visit and subscribe to our very active community forum thread.
If you want to install openHABian on non-supported hardware, you can actually fake it to make openHABian treat your box as if it was one of the supported ones. Needless to say that that may work out or not, but it's worth a try. See openhabian for how to edit openhabian.conf before booting. Set the hw, hwarch and release parameters to match your system best.
openHABian is foremost a collection of bash scripts versioned and deployed
using git. In the current state the scripts can only be invoked through the
terminal menu system whiptail.
There is a longterm need to better separate the UI part from the script code. A
work has started to define conventions and further explain the code base in the
document CONTRIBUTING along with development guidelines in
general.
A good place to look at to start to understand the code is the file
openhabian-setup.sh.
Take a look at the build.bash script to get an idea of the process.
Simply explained run the code below with platform being rpi.
The RPi image is based on the Raspberry Pi OS Lite
(previously called Raspbian) standard image.
sudo bash ./build.bash platform
As the script uses openhab/openhabian git repository during installation it
must sometimes be changed to test code from other repositories, like a new
feature in a fork. There are two commands for replacing the git repo with a
custom one. The first command uses the current checked-out repository used in
the filesystem:
sudo bash build.bash platform dev-git
The second command uses a fully customizable repository:
sudo bash build.bash platform dev-url branch url
Testing is done continuously with Travis-CI using the test framework BATS and the linter ShellCheck. As the tests focus on installing software, a Docker solution is used for easy build-up and teardown.
To run the test suite on a amd64 platform execute the commands below.
Docker and ShellCheck
need to be installed first. For more details regarding the tests see
Test Architecture
in CONTRIBUTING.md.
docker build --tag openhabian/bats-openhabian -f Dockerfile.amd64 .
docker run --rm --name "unit-tests" -i openhabian/bats-openhabian bash -c 'bats --tap --recursive --filter "unit-." .'
docker run --rm --name "installation-tests" -i openhabian/bats-openhabian bash -c 'bats --tap --recursive --filter "installation-." .'
docker run --rm --name "destructive-tests" -i openhabian/bats-openhabian bash -c 'bats --tap --recursive --filter "destructive-." .'
docker build --tag openhabian/install-openhabian -f Dockerfile.amd64 .
docker run --name "install-test" --privileged -d openhabian/bats-openhabian
docker exec -i "install-test" bash -c "./build.bash local-test && mv ~/.profile ~/.bash_profile && /boot/first-boot.bash"
docker stop install-test
docker rm install-test
The ShellCheck linter can be run by using the following commands:
shellcheck -x -s bash openhabian-setup.sh
shellcheck -x -s bash functions/*.bash
shellcheck -x -s bash build-image/*.bash
shellcheck -x -s bash build.bash ci-setup.bash
Happy Hacking!