8. First Steps

Make sure, Homegear is up and running before you continue reading this chapter.

8.1. How to Interact with Homegear

There are two ways to interact with Homegear:

  • First Homegear offers an administration UI. You can access it using the URL https://<homegear IP>/admin.

  • In addition Homegear offers a Command Line Interface (CLI). Through the CLI you can do some basic things like creating users, pairing devices or execute one line script code. You can use it for example to reset your administration UI password.

  • Node-BLUE can by accessed using the URL https://<homegear IP>/nb.

  • The second way is to control Homegear using one of supported RPC protocols. By default Homegear’s RPC server listen on four ports (defined in /etc/homegear/rpcservers.conf):

Port

Description

2001

No SSL, no authentication

2002

SSL enabled, authentication enabled

2003

SSL and authentication enabled

2004

Listens on localhost. No SSL, no authentication

If your client supports SSL and Basic Access Authentication, always connect to port 2003 as it is the most secure. If all your clients support SSL and authentication, disable the first two servers in “/etc/homegear/rpcservers.conf”. If you want to access Homegear over the internet, you should always use SSL and authentication.

Each of the four ports supports all RPC protocols.

In addition Homegear has a built-in webserver that listens on port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) by default.