Everything on these pages is free to download. The Engine is the heart of your Homylon house; agents connect it to your devices (Hue, X10, CoAP, MQTT, Matter); monitors and remotes let you watch and control it. They can run on different machines: on your home network they find each other by themselves.
Most downloads come in three kinds:
- Mac: a ready-to-run app.
- Linux: for a PC or a Raspberry Pi, running in the background as a service.
- Sources: the open source code (MIT licence), to build yourself with Xcode and Swift or to learn from when you write your own agents and tools. The iPhone, iPad and Apple TV apps are only available this way for now.
On a Mac
Download, unzip and move the app to your Applications folder. The apps are not notarized by Apple (yet), so the first time macOS asks you to confirm: right-click the app and choose Open, or on macOS 15 and later open System Settings, Privacy & Security, and choose Open Anyway. After that it starts like any other app.
On Linux
Choose the download that fits your machine: Linux x86-64 for a PC or mini PC, Linux ARM 64-bit for a Raspberry Pi 3, 4 or 5 with a 64-bit system, Linux ARM 32-bit for a Raspberry Pi 2 or any Pi with a 32-bit system. Not sure? Just try one: the install command checks the machine and tells you which one it needs. The 64-bit Raspberry Pi versions need a current Raspberry Pi OS (version 13, "Trixie", or later); the CoAp agent for a PC needs Ubuntu 24.04, Linux Mint 22 or newer.
Keep everything in one folder homylon in your home folder. Put the downloads in homylon/downloads and unpack every agent into its own folder under homylon/agents, named after the agent and without the version number: homylon/agents/hue, homylon/agents/lg and so on. The Engine goes into homylon/engine the same way. Then you always know where the README and the settings of an agent are, and a newer version simply goes into the same folder.
Every Linux download holds four files: the program itself, a command with almost the same name that you use for everything, its settings file and a README. For the Hue agent on a 64-bit Raspberry Pi, for example:
mkdir -p ~/homylon/agents/hue cd ~/homylon/agents/hue tar xzf ~/homylon/downloads/homylonhue-*-linux-arm64.tar.gz --strip-components=1 ./homylonhue install
The --strip-components=1 leaves out the folder with the version number that is in the download, so the four files land directly in homylon/agents/hue.
Install asks for your password once, puts everything in its place and sets it up as a service with its own user. It offers to add avahi-utils, the small helper with which the Engine and the agents find each other. Some programs ask one more thing the first time: the Hue and CoAP agents offer to pair with the bridge or gateway, the MQTT agent asks where your MQTT broker is, and the Matter agent where python-matter-server runs. After that the command works the same for every Homylon program:
homylonhue start start it homylonhue status is it running? homylonhue log what has it been doing? homylonhue settings edit change its settings (then: homylonhue restart) homylonhue boot on start it every time the machine starts homylonhue stop stop it
For the Engine the command is homylon, and homylon start House starts it with your scene "House". Installing a newer version later works the same way: unpack it into the same folder and run install again. It keeps your settings.