It can also be installed using docker containers but that is more difficult to manage as you have to install every component manually.
I guess that my message wasn’t clear but by “component” I meant a home automation component.
I have the following containers in my HA installation:
- Home assistant
- Node red
- MQTT
- Zigbee2mqtt
- Esphome
And maybe others that I have forgotten.
Each had to be installed manually by adding it to my docker compose file, mapping drives, and editing config files.
Most, if not all, of them (except HA) can be installed from within HA if you’re using HAOS.
@nogooduser @rah I’m currently running it in docker, and it’s taught me a lot about docker, but it’s a hell of a technical overhead every time you want an addon.
The documentation very strongly steers you to a whole-os install, and I don’t like that, but I’m tempted. I may well succumb and pick the HA image for my raspberry Pi, start over
The one thing that was a misstep on my docker journey was that the original tutorials that I followed installed them using the command line. It’s much better to do it using a docker compose file.
@nogooduser Oh yes, I agree. Docker documentation is so random. Once I discovered that later versions of compose could inline the buildfile, I realised that was clearly the way to go. But you have to hunt through the docs to find it.
What do you mean with “Operating System”?
It is most often installed as Docker container, which isn’t an OS, but just includes all dependencies to run. You still need an OS (like Debian) as host.
What do you mean with “Operating System”?
If I go to
https://www.home-assistant.io/
and click on “Installation”, ignoring the custom Home Assistant hardware, the first relevant section is “DIY with Raspberry Pi” whose tutorial has a section “Install Home Assistant Operating System”.
The second relevant section of the Installation page is “Install on other hardware” with a paragraph whose second sentence is “The Home Assistant Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices even if you have little to no Linux experience.”
It’s most often installed as HAOS, which is a dedicated operating system that just runs Home Assistant. That is how anyone installing it on say, a Raspberry Pi, is likely to do it.
Home Assistant as a project is far more popular than every single other consumer focused server and as such it is often the first home server (and sometimes only) that many consumers will experience.
SystemHome Assistant OS, the Home Assistant Operating System, is an embedded, minimalistic, operating system designed to run the Home Assistant ecosystem. It is the recommended installation method for most users.
Look into “install home assistant core” on https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux
That’s manual installation which is (a) not distro packages and (b) exactly what distro packages are created to avoid.
Maybe I’m just old school and distro package means something different to me, but here is a link to the Home Assistant .deb distro package:
the Home Assistant .deb distro package
Firstly, that’s a .deb but it’s not from a distro. Secondly, that .deb doesn’t contain Home Assistant, it contains some “Supervised” which runs the Home Assistant Docker container:
It’s true some things are harder to do in the container configuration; it’s easier installed as an OS, especially integrations like Z-Wave, ZigBee, RTSP, Eufy, ESP, and so on. All of these require running other software, and in containers it’s a fair bit of fussing with port and host OS device connections.
I’ve always run it in a container, without issue. It works fine, but I’m comfortable with the command line and LXC. That said, flashing an ESP hardware device and getting it connected to HA running in a container has so far defeated me, because I have to give access to the device in the configuration of the container before I run it, but the device flashing process itself is time limited and expects a process to be waiting on it when it is connected. It’s a chicken/egg problem I haven’t yet figured out which wouldn’t be a problem if I were running the HA OS.
HA isn’t the only software that just works better when it controls the while OS. Kodi is another that encourages users heavily to running it as an OS.
Regardless, it runs fine via
podman pull ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant: latest
and there’s a package in AUR that wraps the container up with a systemd service - it’s as close to a bare package install as you’re likely to get.
What’s a little funny to me is that, despite that I’ve been running HA in a container for the past 4 years, I’m working towards getting a dedicated device and running HA OS on it. If we ever move out of this house, I’m not going to spend weeks going around replacing all of the hardware - smart sockets, lights, garage door opener, security, etc etc - with dumb devices; and for any of that to be worth anything, it’s going to need a controller configured for it, which means, I’m planning on selling the HA server device with the house. For that case, I don’t want anything but HA running on that device, and for that, it’d just be easier and smoother to run HAOS.
My advice is to run HA in a container until you are sure that’s the direction you want to go, but not for so long that it’s going to be a PITA to migrate to a dedicated server. But - hey, just IMHO - plan on running HAOS. If I knew then what I know now, that’s what I would have done.
I installed it on Ubuntu server on my raspberry pi 4 and it took a couple months to fall over and become useless.
I’ve been running their OS since then and it has been absolutely rock solid. It’s been 5 or 6 years now, all I do is add more devices occasionally and update it when it occurs to me.
If you have a life and you don’t absolutely love tuning your OS for special purposes in ways that are already solved problems, the hass os image is the way to go.
