HomeKit Device integration/discovery requires mDNS service access through firewall

Configuration
23

Hey!

Thanks!!

I’ve been having issues configuring the HomeKit Bridge integration and turns out port 5353 is also needed for that.

I’ll add here, in case anyone else finds this when looking for ports to open, that adding 5353 (21063 was already open since that’s the only port bridge docs mention) did make bridge pairing stop failing immediately, but then it just stayed loading forever and eventually timed out.

I checked all ports Home Assistant was listening on (netstat -ln) and opened all of these extra UDP ports: 21064 8123 40000 47831 34041 1900 35698 39446 42277 59682. This fixed it!!
I’m not sure which of those is the one needed by HomeKit (the only one I tested individually for now was 21064, and that one does not fix the issue on its own).

Basically what I have rn is:

  networking.firewall.allowedUDPPorts = [ 
    # HomeKit Bridge  
    21063 21064 5353 
    # Other ports listed as being used by HA (netstat -ln), at least 1 of these also needed by the Bridge
    8123 40000 47831 34041 1900 35698 39446 42277 59682
  ];

I also opened those on TCP just in case.

I wanna test them individually later in order to figure out which port is the one actually affecting HomeKit (maybe they all are since I didn’t have issues with other integrations, but idk). When I figure that out I’ll mention it here or edit this comment to say just the specific ports, but I wanted to already leave this mentioned here just in case someone else has the same problem and finds this post. :blush:

If I figure the specific ports out I’ll probably submit a PR to the docs too in order to list them. I know “hey you need to configure the firewall” is mentioned in other places in the docs, it’s obvious you need to open stuff in the firewall, but actually figuring out which ports need to be opened for each integration takes time and I see no reason not to document them if I know them. ^-^