How to enable Emulated Hue in Home Assistant on Umbrelos
I’m documenting the steps I took to get Alexa to recognize Home Assistant’s Emulated Hue running on Umbrel OS:
1. Configure macvlan
network for the Home Assistant container
I configured the Home Assistant container to use a macvlan network, assigning it its own IP on the local network.
This configuration was necessary to avoid conflicts with the ports used by Umbrel, especially port 80, which is required by Emulated Hue but was already in use.
2. Collect network information
Before configuring the macvlan
network, it is important to know:
- Network gateway
- Subnet (netmask)
- Network interface (e.g.
eth0
,enx0
, etc.)
You can obtain this information by running the command:
ifconfig
And to find out the default gateway, use:
ip route
Ex:
version: '3.7'
services:
homeassistant:
image: homeassistant/home-assistant:2025.4.1
container_name: homeassistant
networks:
home_net:
ipv4_address: 10.0.0.50 # put a free IP on your network here
privileged: true
ports:
- "8123:8123"
volumes:
- ${APP_DATA_DIR}/data:/config
- ${UMBREL_ROOT}/home/Downloads:/media
- /dev:/dev
- /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
restart: unless-stopped
networks:
home_net:
driver: macvlan
driver_opts:
parent: eth0
ipam:
config:
- subnet: 10.0.0.0/24
gateway: 10.0.0.1
3. Configure Home Assistant via configuration.yaml
In this step, I kept the basic, default Home Assistant configuration, only adding the necessary parameters to enable Emulated Hue.
No significant changes were made beyond that.
# Loads default set of integrations. Do not remove.
default_config:
# Load frontend themes from the themes folder
frontend:
themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes
automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml
emulated_hue:
advertise_ip: 10.0.0.50
upnp_bind_multicast: true
host_ip: 10.0.0.50
advertise_port: 80
listen_port: 80
expose_by_default: false
entities:
input_boolean.botao_virtual:
hidden: false
Testing
After configuring the files, you need to restart the Home Assistant container for the changes to take effect.
Note: In some cases, you may need to restart the Umbrel server completely for everything to work properly.
Checking if it’s working
Access the IP you defined for Home Assistant. In my case, I used:
You can also test with the following URLs:
http://<HOME_ASSISTANT_IP>:80/description.xml
It should return an XML file with the Emulated Hue information.
http://<HOME_ASSISTANT_IP>:80/api/v2/lights
Should return the list of devices (lights, scenes, groups, etc.) that are being exposed to Alexa via Emulated Hue.