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If anyone is able to give me a buddy check, I’d appreciate it. Your mission is to install OpenHAB 2 on Debian on a Raspberry Pi Zero and get it to show you any web UI.

After installing OpenHAB2 on Debian 12 (bookworm), I can’t get it to start and serve up the page that asks me which installation I want (e.g. standard). Instead I just get an error 404 from Jetty.

I have reproduced this problem on hardware as well as in a VM, and I’m sad to report that it seems to be repeatable, and also affect Debian 11 (bullseye). Yes, you read that right, the same scripts that used to work to produce a working image no longer work.

The logs show error about downloading add-ons, which were reported here and another thread that I commented on but was unable to resolve.

According to rlkoshak, this shouldn’t happen in 2.5.12 (which is what I have installed; confirmed by both apt and openhab-cli). I also saw the strange report of OpenHAB being 2.5.3 (with openhab-cli, IIRC). I think all the things in this paragraph are red herrings, but I wanted to report them in case anyone trying to reproduce my work sees the same things.

If you want to use literally the same scripts I’m using, check out the v1.5-dev branch of HestiaPi / raspberrypi-automation · GitLab and run this (set up SSH keys first and put the IP of your raspberry pi in there):

cd ansible
ansible-playbook -i 192.168.1.137, --extra-vars "device=mmcblk0 partition_1=mmcblk0p1 partition_2=mmcblk0p2" hestiapi.yml

When it gets stuck and eventually times out, you should be able to browse to http://192.168.1.137:8080 to see the error message from Jetty.

If I don’t get this sorted out in a few days, I’m going to switch gears and try splitting the front-end from the back end. That’ll allow me to try to install OpenHAB 4 on a traditional server and port all the rules over to that. I might try OpenHAB 2 on a traditional server just to see if I can reproduce this issue outside of a Raspberry Pi Zero.

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Im on holidays for a couple of weeks away from my gear. Will try when Im back and hopefully it wont be too late then

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I know of nothing that should have changed to cause this for 2.5.12. But a work around could be to download the add-ons kar file and place that into the /usr/share/openhab/addons. Then OH will install the add-ons from that file instead of trying to downloading them from the internet.

You can find the kar file for 2.5.12 here.

Since 2.5 there have been a ton of improvements in OH and the rules which should reduce the complexity and number of lines of code for the rules by at least half. For example, conversion between degrees C and degrees F happens automatically so there’s no need to maintain two different sets of rules. JS Scripting now supports a modern version of JS and the built in helper library makes the interactions with OH much simpler.

But I’m not sure OH 4 or OH 5 will ever run anything close to reasonably on an RPi 0 W or RPi 0 W2. The amount of RAM required for OH just keeps on increasing. The minimum supported hardware for OH is now an Rpi 4 with at least 2GB RAM. OH 5 requires 64-bit which makes it even more RAM hungry. Have you looked into RPi compute modules as an option?

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Thanks @rlkoshak for your valuable feedback. Compute module has been in the radar as the only viable solution but the complexity of soldering and parts may scare a few DIYers off.

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I re-imaged my pi, modified my setup scripts to download that file before starting OpenHAB and it got past the initial setup. So that seemed to help, @rlkoshak. And thank you for telling me exactly where to get and put the file; I had seen another post which pointed to the directory index of files but I wasn’t sure which one to pull or where to put it, so I appreciate the hand-holding here.

Now I’m on to the next problem (/etc/dhcpcd.conf apparently no longer exists (that’s part of setting up turnkey)). I’ll keep grinding through these until I’ve got it all sorted out.