Setup Ubiquiti mFi on Ubuntu 14.04

Ubiquiti's mFi range is an extensive range of devices that can be used to monitor a variety of devices around your home or business! It features devices such as:

Door Sensors
Current Sensors
Temperature Sensors
Wall & Ceiling Movement Sensors

All of these are powered by the mPort device which acts as the Sensor <> IP Interface

This blog isn't going to teach you how to install Ubuntu 14.04, there are many guides on the internet on how to do that. This assumes that you've got Ubuntu 14.04 installed and accessible on the network.

This guide assumes you are using Ubuntu LTS on a 64bit system.


Make sure your installation is up to date as well by running:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade -y


First step is to install MongoDB. This will be where mFi stores all it's data. To do this we need to import the public key.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10


Next we'll want to create the list file for MongoDB

echo "deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu "$(lsb_release -sc)"/mongodb-org/3.0 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list


Then we'll need to reload the local packages and install the latest MongoDB package

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install mongodb-org -y & mongodb-server -y


This will take around 1-2 minutes depending and will install MongoDB and accocisated packages that it may need.

Once completed, issue the command to see if it's installed correctly and running

sudo service mongod status


and you should get a reply back something along the lines of
mongod start/running, process 13557


If thats the case, lets move on to installing Ubiquiti mFi!
First we need to add the source for Ubiquiti into our sources file, similar to what we did with mFi

echo "deb http://dl.ubnt.com/mfi/distros/deb/ubuntu ubuntu ubiquiti" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list


Next we'll need to add Ubiquiti's GPG Key

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv C0A52C50

Now to the bit we've all been waiting for, to install mFi. We can choose from the pre-release beta or the pubic release. We're going to install the public release as it's considered to be the stable release. But if you want to have a play around with the beta, just install the mfi-beta package.

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install mfi -y

All going well you'll see a line 2 or 3 from the bottom saying 
 * Starting Ubiquiti mFi Controller mfi                       [ OK ]

Now let's go to our web browser and go to https://[IP_Address]:6443

From here you will be able to select your language of preference, the country your based in, and setup a username and password for accessing your mFi server.