Flying the Nest: WebThings Gateway 1.0

WebThings
#1

After four years of incubation at Mozilla, we are excited to announce the release of WebThings Gateway 1.0 and a new home for the WebThings platform. As we mentioned in a message here back in September, the WebThings platform is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project, at the new community-run home of webthings.io. That transition, including some visible changes to project naming and services, is a part of the 1.0 release.

In addition to including some new features (which you can read about in the Gateway 1.0 Release Notes), the first time you log into your updated Gateway you’ll see a banner notifying you of the transition process you’ll need to complete to properly transition your Gateway to the new community infrastructure and services. The steps in that process, along with explanations of the choices you’ll be asked to make, are documented in more detail here.

Those steps are also described in our blog post on Mozilla Hacks, along with what to expect from the 1.0 release as well as from the WebThings project going forward.

We’re excited about taking this next big step! Thank you again for your continued interest in WebThings Gateway, your contributions and your support for the project.

The WebThings Team

1 Like
#2

Great news.

I can’t seem to be able to update my set-up (I only tried one method so far, three or four times).

Context: A while back, I set up my gateway using the raspian v0.12 deb package rather than flash the image so as to retain control other my build.

So while browsing my gateway settings, I can check for updates, my gateway shows me an “update now” button, which goes on to say “In progress” when clicked. However that seems to hang there indefinitely. If I refresh the page it goes back to “Update now”. /etc/webthings-gateway/log/run-app.log does not show anything.

Is this upgrade path not available to me because I installed from the deb package?
What is the best step for me? Should I first uninstall the 0.12 deb, then install the 1.0 deb?
Lastly is there any API change for gateway add-ons (Extension, Adapter, APIHandler
)?

Any word of wisdom welcome.

Regards,
Alain.

#3

Updates via the UI are only supported for the Raspbian image we distribute. If you installed via .deb package, you’ll need to download the new .deb and install it. You can find that here.

#4

No, although we’ve been seeing some minor unexpected issues, since the gateway-addon Node library was translated to TypeScript.

#5

Thank you for both your answers.

#6

I missed the 0.12.0 to 1.0 update window. I guess I was busy and assumed I had more time than I did. Is there any workaround to get 0.12.0 to connect to Webthings.io and update, or am I stuck with having to do a new install and port all of my settings and rules over manually?

Thanks.

#7

aaahhh
 i just as recently as a week ago learned about WebThings gateway. yesterday prepared to get it all installed and working but “https://webthings.io/gateway/” is not reachable / not working!? (server not found). thought it was a glitch; but it has been so for a few days now. is this accessible only form the US? I am in Canada.

#8

Alas, the web site is down again. There has been repeated issues with it crashing once and a while. See related posts a few days ago.

WebThings Gateway is mostly static containg no new development the past year. A new release is planned but it may not contain new features but should include a couple dependent library updates.

Be sure to review Home Assistant. It’s supported well, full featured, but is more complicated to provision/manage.

#9

Just for the record, WebThings Gateway 1.2 alpha (which contains new features) was released in February, 1.2 beta will be released very soon (once work on upgrading the Zigbee and Z-Wave add-ons has finished) and a big project to start work on gateway 2.0 (which will include some big upgrades, security features and a new production quality base OS) kicked off two weeks ago.

Stay tuned for more :slight_smile:

P.S. If the website is down you can download builds from GitHub https://github.com/WebThingsIO/gateway/releases

P.P.S. If you’d like to help with the website outages, please see https://github.com/WebThingsIO/registration_server/issues/99