Can't get homie-ota.py to run (Debian or Ubuntu). Fails missing global section?

[joelrader]

With some mangling I was able to get Homie-OTA to work on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, but now I'm trying to set it up in a more permanent fashion on a Ubuntu 16.04 VM (Proxmox KVM) or on Debian 8. I'm failing, but not sure why. I'm not an experienced user of either Ubuntu or Debian, so I could easily be missing something obvious.

I've following the install instructions, but I can't get homie-ota.py to run manually. As best I can tell, this is where it's failing:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/homie-ota/homie-ota.py", line 39, in <module>
    DEBUG = config.getboolean("global", "DEBUG")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 368, in getboolean
    v = self.get(section, option)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 330, in get
    raise NoSectionError(section)
ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'global'

Does that make sense? Is there something else I need to do on either a Ubuntu or Debian VM? Both seemed to fail at the same spot. Not sure why an RPi would work, but these would not.

I really like the project! This is a great addition to Homie - makes updates and monitoring of units extremely easy. Thank you!

[joelrader]

I believe I've discovered my issue, I had the MQTT broker set in the homie-ota.ini file set as localhost, when I didn't have MQTT set up on the same host. When I switched from localhost to the IP of my broker, the server started up. Previously I had MQTT and Homie-OTA set up on the same host.

Maybe an improvement would be to check the availability of an MQTT broker?

[jpmens]

I'd have imagined "Missing global section" would mean something ... maybe we can improve on error messages, yes.

As to your 2nd comment: no.

[raderjuber]

Just tested a new git clone and install and everything works, thank you!