In openHAB1 all topics are stored in configuration files. That’s still possible and (partly) necessary in openHAB2, but the target of the project team is to administrate things, items, links (channels) etc. by a GUI called PaperUI and storing the data in an internal database.
PaperUI is one of the provided options in the “Welcome menu” shown when launching openHAB2 GUI in your browser (preferred is Chrome) with address “http://localhost:8080”
Hint: At first we will use BasicUI and PaperUI only, later we will talk about HABmin which has to be added as addon.
PaperUI starts with a menu where you can configure your openHAB2 installation:
In the example above we see the bindings extension panel. In addition there a menu points for configuration (things, items, services and bindings), preferences etc.
All things identified by the Discovery service are shown in the Inbox panel. The Control panel is a kind of presentation GUI for items. There is an excellent introduction for PaperUI in this Youtube video by Kai Kreuzer.
One of my biggests issues as newcomer in openHAB2 was to understand how the items and things amanaged by PaperUI (and Discovery service) correlate to the configuration files. It seems that PaperUI only creates topics in its internal database. Nothing is written into configuration files automatically. But the manually created configuration files are still processed. Furthermore, what about the channels and binding information if we still use openHAB1 bindings? What is the really content of openHAB2 repositories?
You can querry this information in two ways:
- configuration menu in PaperUI and
- Karaf console
PaperUI is the preferred way, but currently there are still some gaps because PaperUI is still in beta phase. The good message is that the functionality will be increased step by step. Therefore, let’s use the Karaf command console in parallel (you get this in your command window where openHAB2 was started (start.sh or start.bat):
Typing “help” provides more than 300 possible commands. Don’t worry! For our needs just a handful of them is sufficient for our smarthome project – but we have to know the right ones.
Let’s start with “help smarthome” (sometimes it works better to write the topic partly only):
This gives us a first impression about the powerful set of commands. By the way, you can optionally omit the prefix “smarthome:”, just type “help things”:
.. or “things list”, “items list” etc.
In this way you are enabled to manage your things by commands! See this example:
You can remove things or clear the repository completely. Similarly you can access and manage your items, links, things, inbox etc. Again, the abbreviated version “things list”, “items list” etc. is allowed. In my case it was useful to get the correct names of Channels.
There are a lot of other helpful commands provided. Please try “config”, service”, “system” and “feature” in your console. With “feature:list” you get all available features. You can even filter for a certain feature:
feature:list | grep milight
Finally, we should mention the log commands. The log file can give you more insight what happens (or don’t work) in your openHAB2 setup.
my smarthome with openHAB2 