Things to remember | Installing homebridge on Raspberry Pi B+ with Raspbian Wheezy

The problem

After installing node on the RPi with nvm, I tried installing homebridge but ran into some errors when trying to install the mdns dependency:

    gyp ERR! build error
    gyp ERR! stack Error: `make` failed with exit code: 2
    gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.onExit (/home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/build.js:276:23)
    gyp ERR! stack     at emitTwo (events.js:106:13)
    gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.emit (events.js:191:7)
    gyp ERR! stack     at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:204:12)
    gyp ERR! System Linux 3.12.22+
    gyp ERR! command "/home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/bin/node" "/home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
    gyp ERR! cwd /home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/lib/node_modules/homebridge/node_modules/mdns
    gyp ERR! node -v v6.4.0
    gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v3.3.1
    gyp ERR! not ok
    /home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/lib
    └── (empty)

    npm ERR! Linux 3.12.22+
    npm ERR! argv "/home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/bin/node" "/home/pi/.nvm/versions/node/v6.4.0/bin/npm" "install" "-g" "homebridge" "--unsafe-perm"
    npm ERR! node v6.4.0
    npm ERR! npm  v3.10.3
    npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE

The Fix

After a lot of googling, (esp this page), I found out the gcc g++ installed by default (4.6.3) was out of date, and I needed at least version 4.8 Update that with sudo apt-get install gcc-4.8 g++-4.8

Then set the new default gcc version with

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.8 60 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.8
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.6 40 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.6

Check your version with gcc -v:

gcc version 4.8.2 (Raspbian 4.8.2-21~rpi3rpi1)

And retry npm install -g homebridge (this takes a loooong time) It should work now!

Update

I was running into some trouble setting up homebridge to run in the background and on startup. I think this was probably related to using nvm to install node, which is then not installed under the superuser (I don’t know, not an expert.)

So to get it to work, I just used PM2, which is great. You install it with npm install -g pm2

Then run pm2 start homebridge

And it’s running in the background! To set up auto-start on reboot, just run pm2 startup and it’ll spit out the code you should run to set it up.