I had fun proving the existence of this unicorn set-up. I had heard rumors it was true but thought, no, that’s too good to be true…
I as many of you I’m sure, have a main instance of Home Assistant to tun your house, I’ll call it your Production (Prod) Instance, and another instance to play with, I’ll call it my Development (Dev) Instance. Now it’s kind of hard to have a Dev instance if it doesn’t have any devices, and if needed devices are on the Dev instance, how are you going to use them in the house with the rest without the Dev instance being relied on for part of Prod? Alternatively do you want to install a dongle and devices in a Dev instance that you are not going to really use?
Well I decided to work on cracking the code on Christmas Eve (until 4am) to figure this out. It’s hinted at in the docs here and there, and I’m sure it was done on purpose, however since it is not an officially documented use case, I offer NO guarantees.
Here’s what I did…
On my Prod instance I have a ZWave network using ZWave JS UI with currently 9 devices. It is set-up in the usual way with a Zooz 800 USB stick and the ZWave JS UI Add-on from the Community Store. My Prod instance is HAOS Bare Metal on an old intel x86 machine. My Dev instance in an older X86 running Debian with a VM (because it’s older than UEFI) and no dongles.
To get them both using the same instance of ZWave JS UI Add-on, you go into the configuration of the Add-on and add a port number, any unused number will do.
I picked 13000 in the tradition of adding a 1 for a second instance of a thing.
Once you have that restart the add-on.
Then on the Dev or second Home Assistant server, go into integrations, Zwave to start / create a ZWave integration on the Dev instance.
Look for ZWave,
Uncheck this box :
Use the Z-Wave JS Supervisor add-on
Submit
In this box, using your IP address and the port you picked, type
```ws://YourIPAddressForTheProdHAInstanceThisExample:PortYouPicked``
Submit
It should show you the list of devices and continue on there as on the original.
,
This is how it worked for me.
I want to thank freshcoast for advice with this on Discord…
Discord link to that post.