Home Assistant Installation Methods EXPLAINED!

hey guys and welcome back to another tech tutorial tuesday the series where you guys ask questions and i do my best to answer them as quickly and efficiently as possible and today i wanted to do a little bit of a follow-up to one of the previous videos where we talked about um the best hardware or the most recommended hardware for running your home assistant on and i wanted to follow that up with um explaining all of the different types of installations there are available for home assistant clear up some misconceptions and sort of give you the best or the most recommended way to install home assistant and if you're unsure where to get started and sort of what makes them different to each other what is the best one for each scenario so that's what we're going to do today if you like this video make sure to drop it like and get subscribed if you aren't already and if you want your question answered in the next tech tutorial tuesday make sure to leave it in the comments down below and you never know i might just answer it okay so you watched my previous video you've picked up your brand new shiny hardware for running home assistant whether that's a raspberry pi or a big server that is not ideal so like i was saying you watched the previous video all about home assistant hardware and you picked up your brand new shiny piece of hardware for running home assistant on whether that is a raspberry pi or an intel nook or something similar and you log on to the home assistant website and oh my god that is a lot of installation methods you see words like home assistant os has io supervisor supervised home assistant container home assistant core where do you begin with it all previously there were a number of ways to install home assistant and the naming scheme for those installation types was pretty confusing to say the least we had words like home assistant home assistant virtual environment home assistant docker haas io haas dot io has os yeah it was just um a lot of different terminologies and kind of very confusing mess but they've since renamed those installation types back in early 2020 and i do think they make a lot more sense at least in my opinion we now have four main installation types and they are home assistant os home assistant container home assistant supervised and home assistant core and we're going to get into what exactly those four installation types are in just a few minutes but to understand those installation types we first need to understand some of the core or key components that go into making home assistant work at the moment we have three key components that go into making the home assistant stack and the easiest way i find to think about these is to think of them in layers at the bottom we have home assistant os which is kind of like your base layer and then on top of that we have home assistant supervisor and then at the very top we have home assisting core our base layer home assistant os hopefully doesn't need any explanation but it's the os just like windows or mac os and it's responsible for handling the hardware and also the software our top layer home assistant core is the piece of software that we all have come to know and love and it's responsible for handling things like integrations automations and blueprints scripts your dashboard and all of those good features and then in the middle we have home assistant supervisor and the way i kind of understand this is that it's the middle man between home assistant core and home assistant os and it's kind of bridges that gap it acts as a middleman and it gives us access to features like snapshots and add-ons and it kind of manages our containers for us here's where things might get a little bit complicated so we'll do invest to keep them as simple as possible if we think about the layers of a cake you can't have the upper and the middle layers without having that base layer first you can't have the icing and the jam without that base sponge first well this is kind of like a reverse cake you can't you can have home assistant core without having home assistant supervisor and without having home assistant os you can also have home assistant core and home assistant supervisor without having home assistant os but you can't have home assistant os without having home assistant supervisor and home assistant core i think that analogy made sense in this analogy why didn't i make home assistant core the base sponge layer and why didn't i make home assistant os the top icing layer and the simple answer is it just doesn't seem right to have an os as a top layer that's too big a key component to be the icing but i think we've talked enough about cakes for this video uh hopefully then that analogy made sense if it did leave a comment down below just saying cakes cakes questionable analogies aside remember earlier we talked about the four main installation types for home assistant we have home assistant os home assistant supervised home assistant container and home assistant core so which one should you choose and how do they differ from each other well home assistant os is going to be the easiest and simplest way to get started for most people it's going to give you the full home assistant experience that you would come to expect including add-ons and snapshots as well as a fully managed os so you don't have to worry about updating the os yourself and if you did then you wouldn't have to worry about one component breaking another because it's all handled by home assistant os it's available on a wide range of platforms and they also come with pre-built images meaning it's pretty much guaranteed to work with your hardware there's pre-built images available for raspberry pi's old droids intel nux as well as virtual machine images meaning you can run it on platforms like windows mac os or linux and this is going to give you access to the fuel stack so home assistant core home assistant supervisor and obviously home assistant os and this is definitely the solution i would recommend for most people next up we have home assistant supervised and this is where you want to have access to things like snapshots and add-ons but you want to have a little bit more control over the os or perhaps you already have an os running that's doing other things other tasks and you want to load up home assistant on it so that's where the home assistant supervised is a good option this gives you access to home system core and home assistant supervisor but not home assistant os so essentially you're in charge of managing the underlying os then we have home assistant container which is where you just want access to home assistant core you don't care about things like snapshots or add-ons but you do want to run it in a darker environment meaning you get all of the benefits that go along with that containerized system this is as opposed to our final one which is home assistant core and this is where you just want base home assistant no additional frills and you don't want to run it in docker or a containerized system you want to install it in a python virtual environment meaning that you're in full control over the entire os or perhaps you also don't have an os that is capable of running docker for some reason then home assistant core is the installation that you will use and this is definitely the most advanced option on this list this is definitely the most advanced option because you are entirely responsible for updating the os as well as the dependencies that home assistant relies on as well as the home assistant software itself let's finally clear up some common misconceptions that i see on my travels around the internet when it comes to the different home assistant installations and the first one is i see people saying i use home assistant os i don't have docker and this is actually untrue all except home assistant core use docker as their underlying mechanism for installing home assistant so if you have any of the installation types except from home assistant core then you are using docker even if you install home assistant os as a virtual machine then this still uses docker the next one i often see is that supervised isn't a supported installation method and this is actually untrue because it is actually on the home assistant website as an installation method it's one of the options that they actually list on their website and the reason that this um or people seem to get confused over this is because they use an unsupported os home assistant supervised is a supported installation method as long as you use the os that is in the requirements which at the time of filming is currently debian 10. the reason people think it's unsupported is because they install it on an unsupported os such as ubuntu and then they get a message in supervisor telling them that this is an unsupported installation method it's not an unsupported installation method it's an unsupported os so debian 10 is the one you need if you're going to go the supervised route the next one i often see people asking is will i miss out on home assistant integrations or updates or other features if i don't use home assistant os and the answer is no remember earlier we talked about home assistant core being entirely separate from home assistant os they're kind of their own separate layers and so home assistant core gives you access to all the features on one on home assistant os as it does on home assistant supervised for example so you'll get access to all of the same integrations all of the same automation features and functionalities all of the same dashboard options etc etc the only things that will differ is the functions that supervisor gives you so things like being able to do add-ons or snapshots or the updates those are the only features that are different the main base features of home assistant core are the exact same on home assistant os as they are on home assistant container supervised and core hopefully that makes sense as a quick summary which installation method do i recommend for most people and the one i'm going to recommend for the vast majority of people is home assistant os it's got a large list of compatible devices including being able to run on windows mac os and linux through virtual machines as well as all those pre-built images that we discussed earlier and it's going to give you the full um home assistant experience as well as the smoothest and easiest experience overall if you want the benefits of add-ons and snapshots as well as easier updating and you already have an os in place or you want to have more um control over the os then home assistant supervised is the method that you should choose finally if you don't have a compatible device for running home assistant os or you don't have the ability to run vms or perhaps you already have an os up and running and configured the way you like it then you're going to want to choose home assistant container or home assistant core but that's about all the time we have for this video hopefully you guys enjoyed it and hopefully it cleared up some of the confusion regarding all of the different installation types and if it didn't at least we got to have a good chat about cake which is uh never a bad thing so yeah if you want to support the channel you can do so by becoming a patreon on patreon and your sport allows me to keep on making the videos just like this one thank you to all my current patreon supporters your support is very much appreciated if you like this video make sure to drop a like and get subscribed if you aren't already and i will see you in the next one thank you for watching

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 17,202

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant installation, home assistant installation methods, home assistant installation types, hassio, hassos, home assistant supervisor, home assistant supervised, home assistant core, home assistant OS, home assistant container, home assistant docker, home automation, smart home, home assistant components, how to install home assistant, home assistant install, home assistant setup, home assistant guide

Id: HF6fd5Oi1N8

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021