I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I thought I'd write a quick post.
openHAB configuration is controlled by a number of text files, which define the various rules, items, and sitemaps. The format is quite particular and editing directly on the RPi can be tedious.
Initially I was using the openHAB designer on my laptop to configure openHAB. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX, providing a GUI with which to modify the various files. By also running openHAB on my laptop, I could preview the interface, and then the saved config files were copied to the RPi via SFTP/Samba for deployment.
From what I've read, most people involved in the challenge are following this approach. It is somewhat cumbersome, as you need to copy files across manually.
When a recent burglary left me without a PC, suddenly I couldn't rely on the openHAB designer. I was looking for an easy way to continue development and testing. I wanted to be able to edit the openHAB configuration directly on the RPi. Unfortunately, the openHAB designer does not run on the RPi, and even if it did, would no doubt be hideously slow.
HABmin
Enter HABmin. It allows you to control and configure a running instance of openHAB, using a straight-forward GUI.
It's tremendously easy to install. From your RPi, download the latest release:
wget https://github.com/cdjackson/HABmin/releases/download/0.1.3-snapshot/habmin.zip
Then unzip to your openHAB folder. In my case this is done with the command:
unzip habmin.zip -d /opt/openhab
Restart openHAB and then you can navigate to the HABmin URL: http://<openHAB IP address>:8080/habmin/index.html
The HABmin interface isn't perfect, but find the workflow much better than using openHAB designer. It's also more convenient, as you can edit on the fly. Even now, when I have a replacement laptop, I continue to use HABmin to configure my openHAB install.
