A no BS guide to running homebridge in the background on a unix system (requires systemd). Works 70% of the time every time.

Add user to run homebridge under
sudo useradd --system homebridge

Create directory for it
sudo mkdir /var/lib/homebridge

Own the directory permissions
sudo chown -R homebridge:homebridge /var/lib/homebridge sudo chmod 777 -R /var/lib/homebridge

Copy your home directory’s config (if you don’t have one already, edit it instead)
sudo cp ~/.homebridge/config.json /var/lib/homebridge/config.json

Copy your home directory’s persist directory (if it exists) sudo cp -R ~/.homebridge/persist /var/lib/homebridge/persist

Determine where homebridge is aliased
which homebridge

Edit the systemd service
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/homebridge.service

Paste in the contents of homebridge.service from here. Make sure to replace /usr/local/bin/homebridge with where homebridge is actually installed.

Exit nano
control + x, Y

sudo nano /etc/default/homebridge
Paste in the contents of homebridge from here.

Reload systemd configs
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Enable and start the service
sudo systemctl enable homebridge
sudo systemctl start homebridge

Check on its status
sudo systemctl status homebridge

If something is wrong, check the logs.
journalctl -u homebridge

At this point if there are any issues, live vicariously via google and stackoverflow.

🏝