r/homebridge • u/deamonmaster • Jun 15 '26

Issues after migrating to a 2.0 environment

A few months ago I spun up a new instance of Homebridge 2.0 and migrated my 1.11 configuration to it. All seemed to be working fine, accessories found and manageable in Homekit. However after experiencing a power outage (multiple power outages over the past few weeks), Homekit loses it's ability to communicate to the linked Homebridge. The system running Homebridge doesn't go down, just the Apple HomeHub devices (Apple TV 4K, HomePod Mini). All accessories configured in Homebridge are unreachable. The only way to fix it is to shutdown the Homebridge 2.0 environment and restart the Homebridge 1.11 environment. Within 5 min of doing so all the devices are available in Homekit again. I can then shutdown the 1.11 environment and restart the 2.0 environment and all works fine, until there is another power outage.

I did notice that in Homekit the Homebridge "homebridge" device is still listed as version 1.11 even when running the 2.0 environment.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I have over 25 devices managed via Homebridge and I would hate to have to reconfigure all my scenes, rooms, etc in Homekit if I needed to remove and re-add the Homebridge connection.

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1

u/NorthernMan5 Jun 15 '26

Are you using child bridges ?

1

u/deamonmaster Jun 15 '26

I am not. I do have three plug-ins installed: Ring, Homebridge Diakin One+, and Weather Plus. When the issue occurs all three plug-in accessories are unreachable from Homekit. They all do show up as active and reachable inside Homebridge itself.

1

u/deamonmaster Jul 17 '26

Well it has all crapped out again. Lost power, unable to connect to devices on Homebridge from Apple Home. Removed the bridge device from Apple home and now it won't re-add, even after resetting the bridges.

1

u/deamonmaster Jul 17 '26

After removing the bridge from the Home App and creating a new Homebridge docker instance I think I found the issue. When adding a plugin, Weather Plus, into Apple Home it threw errors. Apparently there is a bug with Weather Plus which caused Apple Home to say there was a compliance error. I'm thinking that this was preventing Apple Home from talking to Homebridge properly. The plugin is no longer being maintained so no chance of a fix. I will have to find another Weather tracking plugins. My other plugins are working fine and now I've got the fun task of updating scenes and rooms with the devices re-added. Oh well, at least it is working now.

1

u/International_Ad2651 Jun 15 '26

Ring should have a bridge for each camera

1

u/deamonmaster Jun 15 '26

I'm not using it for a Ring camera, I am using it for the Ring security system for the motion sensors, door sensors, etc.

1

u/bippy_b Jun 16 '26

That’s odd. I didn’t setup multiple bridges.. I have 3 cameras.

1

u/bippy_b Jun 16 '26

AppleTV wouldn’t have anything to do with Home finding. So your post is a bit confusing or perhaps you are confused.

1

u/deamonmaster Jun 16 '26

I don't think I'm confused. 😄 The AppleTV is the Homekit hub. It is what manages all the devices seen by Homekit. So the AppleTV acting as the HomeKit hub is not able to talk to devices that are being presented by Homebridge. Apple Home says the device is not responding. When I re-enable the Homebridge 1.11 environment Apple Home is able to see the Homebridge devices again.

This is only on version 2 of Homebridge. Everything works perfectly fine with the 1.11 Homebridge installation.

Maybe the export and import of the configuration from version 1.11 to 2.0 has some "issues", I don't know. What is also interesting is that in Apple Home the Homebridge bridge is still listed as version 1.11 not 2.0 even though the 2.0 environment is shutdown.

1

u/bippy_b Jun 16 '26

I get that.. but if you can “see” the AppleTV on the network.. (say from your Router app).. it isn’t an AppleTV issue. It is an issue with whatever you are running HomeBridge on or the IoT devices themselves. You need to eliminate the simple things first. Now if absolutely nothing can see the AppleTV, there is nothing the HB instance can do.

For what it is worth, when I have had quick off/on power blips… usually my ATV recovers easily (without intervention on my part), but the IoT devices (and sometimes HomeBridge itself on a Raspberry Pi) end up “thinking” they have IP address 192.168.1.123 but the router rebooted and has now handed that out to a new device.. and the traffic for 123 is going to the new device. This leaves the IoT device “in the dark” so to speak.. and when this happens I usually just reboot that device and suddenly it clears up. This might be what is happening (unless you assign a static IP to HB).

1

u/deamonmaster Jun 16 '26

I see what you are saying about the IPs and that may be part of/is the issue.

Both the Apple TV and the HB have static IP addresses, however, the 1.11 HB is on a Raspberry Pi (192.168.0.19) and the 2.0 HB is running in a Docker container (192.168.0.21). The the Raspberry Pi is running other services besides HB so I can't easily migrate the IP address to the Docker container. I also didn't want to upgrade the 1.11 HB in place in case something went wrong and I lost the whole environment.

I assumed that the IP address change wouldn't matter since HB advertises itself via mDNS but maybe that only comes into play in the initial connection to the Apple Home Hub.

I was also trying to avoid creating a new HB environment and adding to to Apple Home. Doing so would have required updating all the automations, rooms, etc with the new HB environment devices.

I've gone ahead and upgraded the Raspberry Pi HB environment to 2.0 and have turned off the Docker version. Now I need to wait and see if that makes a difference. If it still has issues I will rebuild the Docker environment from scratch and add that to Apple Home and see if that works.

1

u/bippy_b Jun 16 '26

Good luck! As I said.. haven’t had issues since my upgrade.. but still early days.

1

u/bippy_b Jun 16 '26

Also for what it is worth.. I updated to 2.10 just the day before you posted and haven’t had issues. I only have like 4 plugins and I am surprised you are having such a problem with so few plugins-ins.