HomeKitty crashes on Homey Self-Hosted Server

[filoor]

Hi,

I installed HomeKitty v2.2.7 on a Homey Self-Hosted Server, but the app crashes immediately after installation.

Environment
• Homey type: Homey Self-Hosted Server
• Homey version: 12.10.1
• HomeKitty version: 2.2.7
• Homey mobile app version: 9.6.7.1869
• Connection: Local (secured)
• Platform: iOS

What happens
• HomeKitty installs successfully
• App status switches to “Crashed”
• No flows are available
• CPU/RAM insights are empty
• Restarting the app does not resolve the issue

Additional notes
This setup is running fully locally on Homey Self-Hosted. Other apps are working fine.

Thanks in advance!

[robertklep]

When Athom provides a free SHS license for app developers I'll take a look at it.

[filoor]

When running HomeKitty on Homey self-hosted (Docker / Linux), the app crashes immediately when HomeKit starts.

Error:
Error: bind EADDRINUSE 0.0.0.0:5353 at node:dgram at hap-nodejs

On Homey self-hosted, mDNS (Avahi) is always running, so UDP port 5353 is already in use. HomeKitty tries to start its own mDNS via hap-nodejs, which results in EADDRINUSE and a crash loop. Disabling Avahi is not possible.

This is reproducible and not related to network interface or IP configuration.

Expected behavior:
HomeKitty should not crash when mDNS is already active. Either disable HomeKit mDNS advertising on Homey self-hosted, or handle the EADDRINUSE error instead of exiting.

Possible fix:
Disable mDNS/advertising in hap-nodejs (e.g. mdns: false / advertise: false) or gracefully handle EADDRINUSE.

Happy to help test or provide more logs if needed.

[robertklep]

I think it's a subtly different issue, since the Homey Pro hardware also runs Avahi on port 5353 and it's not an issue there.

Perhaps the start of HomeKitty causes Avahi to start up on SHS, and since the Docker container is running on the host network it may cause a conflict with the host zeroconf daemon.

But without debugging with an SHS setup myself I'm not going to change anything to an app that has run fine for a long time.