I had trouble with a bulb on the Hue bridge, had to remove it in Hue, so I then needed to add it again to Hubitat through the Hue Bridge.. When I had to delete the old bulb it warned me that it was used in about 10 different rules, dashboards and so on..
But hey.. What can you do.. So I had to remove it. And it made everything totally broken.. So I had to update everything manually again.
I have more bulbs I need to replace in the future, and it seriously frightens me that this is such a hassle, is there not possible to add like a "placeholder bulb" so rules and stuff continue to work as usual, and then you can replace that "placeholder bulb" with your new bulb?
I haven't used this option yet but there is an option to swap a device in your apps.
I believe the process would be to pair in your new device.
Then go to settings -> Swap App Device.
You can then select your old device and your new device and in theory it should replace the old device with the new device in your apps.
I think the only device type it will not work for is a child device.
Like I said, I personally haven't tried it yet..........
The feature mentioned above would almost do what you're looking for: Swap Apps Device. However, as @bobbles noted, it will not work with child devices--and unfortunately for the particular use case you mentioned, Hue devices are child devices of the Hue Bridge Integration app. So, they won't show up.
As long as you don't have to set up a new instance of the Hue Bridge Integration app itself, however, there's a little trick you can use to just swap one bulb with another. (If you do install an entirely new instance of this app, they'll be child devices of different apps and this won't work at all.) On the Device Detail page, take note of the Device Network ID (DNI) for the Hue bulb. It will be in a format like 123/45, where "123" is the app ID of the Hue Bridge integration app on your hub (you can ignore this part) and "45" is the Hue-assigned light ID (in the v1 Hue API, which you don't really need to know other than that it's how the Bridge and this app know which device is really which between the two). So, doing something like this should work:
Add the new Hue Bulb
Open the Device Detail page of the new Hue bulb, and note its current DNI. Edit this DNI to something like "xx123/45" if it's currently "123/45" (anything unique; I'm using "xx" at the beginning here to make it easy to find later), then select Save Device.
Replace the DNI of your "old" bulb with the DNI of your "new" bulb from the previous step.
Delete the "new" device (the one whose DNI you edited in Step 2), which should not be in use by any apps at this point.
This sort of like the old Z-Wave node ID/DNI trick some people used before Swap Apps Device existed, and I normally wouldn't recommend it. I'd still suggest being careful (take a hub backup before--why not?). But since Swap Apps Device won't work with child devices, this is probably the next easiest thing if you don't want to manually swap.
