openHAB Web Interface Add-ons

This repository contains the official web user interfaces for openHAB.

openHAB has a main web UI but more can be installed thanks to its modular add-on architecture.

Most UIs rely on openHAB's REST API which is largely implemented in openHAB Core bundles, but sometimes on individual add-ons. Therefore, a significant chunk of issues that can be mistakenly assumed to be UI issues could in fact be depending on an extension of the REST API.

Therefore, if your issue is not strictly UI-related it will eventually be transferred or closed with an indication that it requires a change in openHAB Core to be implemented.

If you are interested in openHAB Core development, we invite you to come by on https://github.com/openhab/openhab-core.

If you have a problem with the web UIs, head over to

Development / Repository Organization

openHAB add-ons are Java .jar files.

The openHAB build system is based on Maven. The official IDE (Integrated development environment) is Eclipse.

You find the following repository structure:

.
+-- bom       Maven buildsystem: Bill of materials
|   +-- openhab-ui  Lists all extensions
|
+-- bundles   Official openHAB web interface extensions
|   +-- org.openhab.ui
|   +-- org.openhab.ui.basicui
|   +-- org.openhab.ui.habot
|   +-- org.openhab.ui.habpanel
|   +-- ...
|
+-- features  Part of the runtime dependency resolver ("Karaf features")
|
+-- licenses  Infrastructure to easily add license headers to source files
|
+-- tools     Static code analyser instructions
|
+-- CODEOWNERS  This file assigns people to directories so that they are informed
|   if a pull-request would modify their add-ons.
|
+-- LICENSE   The official license for this repository.

How to contribute

You don't need a Java development for UI development, in most cases.

Instead, make sure you have NodeJS 12.16 or later and npm 6.14 or later installed.

Then identify in the bundles directories where the frontend code is - for instance, for the main UI it is bundles/org.openhab.ui/web/. Then follow the instructions in the specific add-on's CONTRIBUTING.md file to get started. In the main UI's case, it is located in bundles/org.openhab.ui/CONTRIBUTING.md. In many cases it will involve executing some npm commands to install dependencies and start a development server.

However, if you want to compile the final .jar add-ons, we have assembled some step-by-step guides for different IDEs on our developer documentation website:

https://www.openhab.org/docs/developer/#setup-the-development-environment

Command line build

To build all add-ons from the command-line, type in:

mvn clean install

To improve build times you can add the following options to the command:

Option	Description
-DskipChecks	Skip the static analysis (Checkstyle, FindBugs)
-DskipTests	Skip the execution of tests
-Dmaven.test.skip=true	Skip the compilation and execution of tests
-Dfeatures.verify.skip=true	Skip the Karaf feature verification
-Dspotless.check.skip=true	Skip the Spotless code style checks
-o	Work offline so Maven does not download any updates
-T 1C	Build in parallel, using 1 thread per core

For example you can skip checks and tests during development with:

mvn clean install -DskipChecks -DskipTests

Adding these options improves the build time but could hide problems in your code. Parallel builds are also less easy to debug and the increased load may cause timing sensitive tests to fail.

To check if your code is following the code style run: mvn spotless:check To reformat your code so it conforms to the code style you can run: mvn spotless:apply

When your add-on also has an integration test in the itests directory, you may need to update the runbundles in the itest.bndrun file when the Maven dependencies change. Maven can resolve the integration test dependencies automatically by executing: mvn clean install -DwithResolver -DskipChecks

The build generates a .jar file per bundle in the respective bundle /target directory.

Happy coding! 🎉

Thanks to BrowserStack for kindly providing the maintainers with free open source accounts to help testing the UIs on a wide range of devices!