📢 WebThings Gateway 2.1 Beta available for testing

[bfrancis (Ben Francis)]

Dear WebThings community,

Happy Things Thursday!

I’m writing to let you know that early builds of WebThings Gateway 2.1 Beta are now available for testing. So far the release includes:

• Support for the new “occupancy sensor” capability (used by the Zigbee add-on and Virtual Things add-on so far)
• UI Bugfixes
• Security patches

You can run the latest WebThings Gateway 2.1.0-beta.2 Docker image using a command like:

docker run \
    -d \
    -e TZ=Europe/London \
    -v /path/to/shared/data:/home/node/.webthings \
    --network="host" \
    --log-opt max-size=1m \
    --log-opt max-file=10 \
    --name webthings-gateway \
    webthingsio/gateway:2.1.0-beta.2

(replacing /path/to/shared/data with a directory in which you would like to store the .webthings data directory)

As ever your feedback, ideas and contributions are most welcome - here and on GitHub.

–

Meanwhile work also continues on the WebThings App and WebThings Framework and there are some exciting developments on the standardisation front as the W3C WoT Working Group have expressed an interest in turning the Web Thing Protocol into a formal W3C standard. See my recent blog post on why I think there is a need for this universal web-based application layer protocol for the Web of Things, and how this has been a long term ambition of the WebThings project.

Kind regards

Ben

[lenno]

Is there no update/s for the Snap package?

[bfrancis (Ben Francis)]

@lenno

Is there no update/s for the Snap package?

Not yet. Are you using the snap package? If people are interested in that then we can release 2.1 Beta as a snap package too.

Now that we’re no longer targeting Ubuntu Core as a replacement base operating system I’m less motivated to work on it, but I do think it’s useful and arguably more user friendly to install than the Docker image so if people are interested in using/contributing to that then we can keep maintaining it.

Ben

[lenno]

Yes I’m using the snap again.

I did go back to using version 1.1 because the Telegram addon doesn’t work in version 2.0 and I really needed notifications but then I discovered the Pushover addon and it works in version 2.0 so I’m back using version 2.0 again using the snap.

Pushover is really good by the way.

[Antonio_Benci]

Hi Lenno.

I’ve just been donated a Dell Optiplex 9020 SFF PC with Kubuntu already installed. After a bit of a system tidy-up and update to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS I’ve installed the SNAP option but am unable to get anything happening to be able to appear on https://localhost:8080 in Firefox.

Do you have any suggestions? Or should I just wipe the system and install the base version of Ubuntu.

When I run “ss -nltp”, all I get back is;

State Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address:Port Peer Address:Port Process
LISTEN 0 4096 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:*
LISTEN 0 4096 127.0.0.53%lo:53 0.0.0.0:*
LISTEN 0 4096 127.0.0.54:53 0.0.0.0:*
LISTEN 0 32 192.168.122.1:53 0.0.0.0:*
LISTEN 0 50 :1716 : users:(("kdeconnectd",pid=1809,fd=20))
LISTEN 0 4096 [::1]:631 [::]:

With no port 8080 evident.

Sorry for just poking into this conversation, I’m fairly fresh to Linux so still learning.

Regards, Antonio Benci

[Antonio_Benci]

Or should I just go the Docker option?

[lenno]

Hi Antonio,

If the Firewall is enabled you would need to open port 8080.

Also try http instead of https and try using the local IP address. eg. http://192.168.122.1:8080 (or whatever your IP address is)

Also another thing to check would be the Firefox setting that only allows https connections- change to “Don’t enable HTTPS-Only Mode”

[Antonio_Benci]

Hi Lenno.

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately nothing thus far has worked.

Firewall is off, Firefox is set to “Don’t enable HTTPS-Only Mode”.

I’ll dive headfirst into Docker ( ) and see how I go.

[lenno]

I had the same issue you’re having when I tried installing the snap on Raspberry Pi OS so the only other thing I’d suggest is installing Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu.

[Antonio_Benci]

Hi Lenno.

Was hoping you’d not suggest that.

Oh well, next thing to try. Cheers.

[Antonio_Benci]

Some success…

The hardware: Dell OptiPlex 9020M Micro-Form-Factor PC [AU$90.00]

Operating System: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4, KDE Frameworks Version: 6.24.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2, Kernel Version: 7.0.0-27-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-4590T CPU @ 2.00GHz
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.7 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® HD Graphics 4600

webthingsio/gateway:2.1.0-beta.2

After a whole lot of reading, failure, reading some more. The following Docker script, saved as a bash script works…

#!/bin/bash
docker run
-d
--name webthingsio-gateway
-e TZ=Australia/Melbourne
-v /home/node/.webthings
-p 8080:8080
-p 4443:4443
--log-opt max-size=1m
--log-opt max-file=10
webthingsio/gateway:2.1.0-beta.2

Accessible at: http://localhost:8080

Some Bugs: Localisation:Unable to change country.

Web Thing and Tasmota are not working, probably network related.

And others. More testing to do.

[bfrancis (Ben Francis)]

Hi @Antonio_Benci, I’m glad you got this working using the Docker image.

FYI switching the country is not currently supported in the Docker image. All it actually does is set the regulatory country for the Wi-Fi adapter, which was important for the old Raspberry Pi image but likely unnecessarily when running the Docker image on your own OS. I realise it looks broken though so I’ve filed an issue to fix that. You should still be able to choose the localisation language and units.

Please let us know how you get on and whether you are able to resolve the issues with the web thing and Tasmota adapters.