Does hubitat support mDNS for user apps

I am working on updating my app code to replace SSDP with mDNS discovery, because the SSDP method is being retired in the hue hub device.

Has there been any effort to make mDNS discovery an option in Hubitat custom apps?

@Hubitat_Staff can someone update if mDNS is available yet? I think Hubitat uses it internally, but for developers, can we query mDNS for device discovery now?

@kahn-hubitat - I'm not the best with the terminology here, but is this not what you did with your Ecowitt the other day, using @thebearmay 's DNS lookup code?

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Nope. Ecowitt uses DDNS (dynamic DNS). DDNS is regular DNS, where the DNS server provides an interface for nodes to self-register their IP Address on the DNS server.

What I want to know about is mDNS (aka, multicast DNS, aka, Bonjour). It is most commonly implemented in open source operating systems using the Avahi service which is an implementation of mDNS.

My concern is that Hue is deprecating the SSDP discovery protocol on their hubs, replacing it with mDNS instead. Since mDNS uses multicast, we cannot easily (if at all) implement this in our code unless HE developers make an interface for it available to us. Once SSDP if removed from the Hue hub, even the internal hue integration will fail hub discovery, so I am hoping work has begun already on the implementation so I can leverage it.

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Always something for me to learn.... :slight_smile: I'd seen the acronym but never really found out what the difference was. Hopefully there will be an answer soon.

@gopher.ny what say you?

We use mDNS for hubitat.local. It's in the OS.

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Thanks @gopher.ny, understood. Can I use mDNS in my app code to query for devices, and if so, what is the mechanism used?

Hi @gopher.ny,

Is mDNS available for app/driver use?

Hoping this will be available to apps soon. Hue has replaced SSDP with mDNS, and will deprecate SSDP

Not at this time. I'll check it out. Please ping me again in a week or so if I go silent.

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Wake you up to feed and go potty? :rofl:

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Iā€™m planning out a driver now for a network device and would also like to have access to mdns. Would be great to be able to avoid hard coding IPs everywhere!

Agreed. Many network devices have mDNS names, and not having to ask people to set static IPs would be a huge benefit. It would be even more useful to discover devices via mDNS to ease connections to those network devices.

Perhaps I missed it in another thread - But any update around making mDNS available to user apps/drivers?