Philips Hue

Your Hue bulbs on a screen, talking straight to the bridge on your shelf — no Hue account, no cloud, and one requirement worth knowing before you start.

The light widgets need the Home plan or above. Connecting a Hue bridge does not.

Save as PDF This did not answer it

One thing to know first

Hue only works if you have a Mirra screen switched on and on the same network as your bridge.

That is not a limitation we chose, and it is worth explaining rather than burying. A Hue bridge can only be reached from inside your own home. Our servers are in a data centre and are not on your network. The browser showing you this page usually is on your network — but the bridge refuses browsers outright: it identifies itself with a certificate no browser has accepted since 2017, and its newer interface will not answer a web page at all.

A screen is the one thing in the product standing in the right place. So a screen does the talking, and everything below assumes there is one.

No screen on that network means nothing here will work, however correct the address is. If you have not set a screen up yet, do that first.

Connecting it

Two steps, and the second one is a walk.

Find your bridge's address. It is the small white circular box plugged into your router. Your router's device list will show it, and the Hue app has it under Settings, My hue system, and then the bridge itself.
Type that address into Integrations, Philips Hue, and press Continue.
Go and press the big round button on top of the bridge.
That is all. There is nothing to click afterwards — a screen is already asking every few seconds, and the page notices on its own within about five.

Why the button matters

A Hue bridge hands out access only in the thirty seconds after somebody physically presses the button on it. That press is the whole security model: it is how the bridge knows the person asking is standing in the house rather than somewhere on the internet.

It is also why we do not ask you for a Hue password, and why there is no Hue account involved anywhere in this. Nothing you set up here is registered with Philips, and none of it stops working if their servers go down.

What you get

Your bulbs appear in the picker of every light tile, alongside anything else you have connected. Rooms come across from the Hue app, so there is nothing to sort out twice.

What each bulb offers depends on the bulb. A colour bulb gets a colour wheel; a white ambiance one gets warmth but no colour, because it genuinely cannot show one; a plain dimmable bulb gets a brightness slider; and a Hue smart plug gets on and off. Controls a bulb cannot use are hidden rather than shown and ignored.

Brightness, colour and warmth from any light tile.
Art matching, where a picture on the screen tints the lamps around it.
Light rules, the assistant and the public API, the same as any other light.

If you also run Home Assistant

Connect one or the other, not both, unless you know why you want both.

A Hue bridge is one of the most commonly added Home Assistant integrations, so if you already run Home Assistant your bulbs are almost certainly in Mirra already. Adding this as well would list every bulb twice in every picker, and turning a room off would write to each bulb down two paths. Where we can tell that a bulb is arriving both ways, we hide the Hue copy — but the tidier answer is to pick one.

When something is not right

The usual causes, in the order they usually turn out to be true.

Nothing happens after pressing the button — check a screen is switched on and on the same network as the bridge. If the screen was set up a while ago, re-run the installer on it; older screens are missing the helper that reaches your network.
A light shows as having no power — that is the bulb's wall switch being off. Mirra cannot turn on a bulb with no electricity, and shows it greyed rather than hiding it so you know it is still there.
A bulb is missing after a bridge reset — a factory reset renumbers everything. Disconnect and set the bridge up again.
Lights stopped after a router reboot — your bridge may have been given a new address. Type the new one in; you should not need to press the button again.

Integrations: what they are, and turning them onAn integration is an outside source that several widgets draw on — this explains what turning one on and off does, and why Mirra refuses to turn one off while its widgets are still on a scene.
Lights, light rules and WLEDOne light model across Home Assistant bulbs, WLED strips, Govee lamps and Hue bulbs: adding a controller, what a rule can do, how a segment becomes a light, and which of the four leave your network at all.
Govee lightsPut Govee lamps, strips and light bars on a mirror without running Home Assistant — including the one thing no other light integration can do, which is work while every screen in the house is asleep.
Home AssistantHow Mirra reaches Home Assistant through a screen on your own network, what it syncs, what it notices, and what each failure message means.
Every widget there isThe complete list of widgets Mirra ships with, grouped the way the scene editor groups them, with what each one shows and what it needs before it will show anything.
Running Mirra yourselfWhat the three parts of Mirra are, the environment variables they need, what production refuses to start without, and how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a screen.