openHAB 2 is the successor of openHAB 1. It is fully based on the Eclipse SmartHome project and thus in general not backward-compatible to openHAB 1. Nonetheless, there is a compatibility layer, so that many openHAB 1 add-ons can still be used with it - all bindings that have already been reported to be compatible are listed on the add-ons list page.
The general setup process is fairly similar to openHAB 1, you will not have many surprises if you are familiar with openHAB 1.
For a quick start, there is now also a demo package available, which combines a runtime with a couple of add-ons and a sample configuration.
There are a few changes in openHAB 2 that you should be aware of, if you are coming from openHAB 1:
- there is a new dashboard, which welcomes you at http://localhost:8080 (assuming openHAB is running on your local machine) and provides you links to the different UIs
- there is an early prototype of a new HTML5-based UI that allows to configure and operate the system, calles Paper UI
- the Classic UI URL has changed from
/openhab.app
to/classicui/app
, so you can access your sitemaps athttp://<server>:8080/classicui/app?sitemap=<yoursitemap>
- a new default sitemap provider is in place, which provides a dynamic sitemap with the name
_default
, which lists all group items that are not contained within any other group. - the
configuration
folder has been renamed toconf
- instead of the global
configuration/openhab.cfg
file, there is now an individual file per add-on inconf/services
- The OSGi console commands are now available as "smarthome", not as "openhab" anymore.
- the REST API does NOT support XML nor JSON-P anymore. It is now fully realized using JSON.
- the REST API does not support websocket access anymore - it actually completely drops "push" support and only has a simple long-polling implementation to provide a basic backward-compatibility for clients.
- the webapps folder has been discontinued, so there is no way to make files available this way through HTTP.
- it is possible to provide your own custom icons in the
conf/icons/classic
folder - no need to overwrite the icons that come with the runtime - the rule syntax has slightly changed, you e.g. do not need import statements anymore for the most common classes (see the Migration Guide for details). At the same time, there is no openHAB Designer anymore, but the Eclipse SmartHome designer can be used.
The following restrictions are known (and need to be worked on):
- there is no way yet to enable authentication on HTTP(S)
- the Eclipse SmartHome Designer marks all openHAB actions as errors (yet the runtime will correctly execute them)
- GreenT does not work as the webapps folder does not exist anymore