Which Home Assistant install is right for you?

so you want to install home assistant excellent choice you head over to the home assistant website click the installation documentation and find out that there are four ways to install home assistant and you don't really know what the difference between them is or maybe you've been running the home assistant operating system on a raspberry pi and you're beginning to outgrow it you see all these cool youtubers are running home assistant in containers and you want to know what the fuss is about well you've come to the right place in this video we'll take a look at the different home assistant installation methods along with the pros and cons of each of them by the end of the video you'll be able to pick which installation method works best for you hey home automation guy start the show in this video we're going to focus on the two most common installations the home assistant os and the home assistant container methods there are two alternative methods available but we're not going to go into those because they're mainly for nerds that think that python is a decent programming language let's start with the home assistant operating system this thing is absolutely amazing and makes it really easy for anyone with even a limited amount of technical knowledge to get up and running using home assistant in just a few minutes the home assistant os is a fully fledged operating system home automation platform and everything that you need to manage it in a really handy web interface wrapped up in a single installation it's a thing of beauty you can install the home assistant os directly onto a raspberry pi via an sd card onto an intel nock pc running on a solid state or normal hard drive or even onto an old computer or laptop that you have lying around the house installing home assistant os onto a raspberry pi is by far the easiest way to get started you just plug your pi's sd card into a computer download a flashing tool which copies the os onto the sd card then you plug the sd card back into the pi and turn it on voila you're good to go installing the home assistant os onto an intel nok pc an old laptop or computer is a bit more complicated because you either need to remove the hard drive from it and then flash the os to it via another computer or you can use a bootable usb drive to load up ubuntu live or another operating system and do the flashing through it whichever way you choose to go there are detailed instructions available on the home assistant website that guide you through the entire process once you're done you'll have an operating system running on this computer that boots up directly into the home assistant os you can now add your smart devices and integrations and begin creating automations from scratch or through blueprints from the community the home assistant operating system comes with something called the supervisor the supervisor does exactly what it sounds like it keeps an eye on everything to make sure that it's working properly the supervisor takes care of installing and updating the home assistant application it manages and updates the underlying linux operating system and it also looks after things called add-ons add-ons are different home automation services and programs often created by non-home assistant developers and companies that you can add on to home assistant they sort of run independently from home assistant but provide additional functionality and capabilities under the hood home assistant the supervisor and add-ons technically running in docker containers but the supervisor and the operating system hides all of that complicated stuff from you so you don't actually need to know anything about docker or containers add-ons are available to install via the add-on store and you can choose from official home assistant add-ons community add-ons or even use third-party add-ons the concept works very similarly to the home assistant community store or hacks but instead of allowing you to install integrations to services add-ons install the actual services themselves let's look at an example to make this a bit clearer a lot of people run a service in their home called plex plex is a media service that allows you to effectively create your own local netflix out of any video and audio files you have stored on your computer you know all those dvds that you ripped to your hard disk in a legal manner so that you could stream them to tvs and devices in your house many people run the plex media server on a nas device or on their desktop computer and then connect to that machine from their tvs or tablets well home assistant has an integration available that allows you to connect to an existing plex media server and can be used to play media and in automations well thanks to the home assistant os and its concept of add-ons you can now install the plex media server add-on next to home assistant on the same computer this means you no longer need to run plex on your nas or on your desktop computer an integration connects home assistant to a third-party service and add-on is the third-party service the concept of add-ons with the add-on store is one of the main advantages of the home assistant os there are hundreds if not thousands of add-ons out there for all kinds of things like frigate for detecting objects on your security camera streams zigbee to mqtt wireguard for vpn access z-wave js d-cons and so many more the home assistant os also takes care of backing up and restoring your home assistant installation it will take backups for you before you install any updates or you can create automations to take backups at regular intervals you can also restore backups if you migrate your system or if you have some sort of catastrophic problem you can even get add-ons that store these backups on google drive or other cloud providers in case your whole system gets nuked the home assistant os is so easy to use and everything you need can be controlled from within the home assistant user interface this is why i think that the home assistant operating system installation method is the best installation method for most people out there it does have a few disadvantages though firstly you need to dedicate an entire computer to running the home assistant os you can't really run anything else on it other than home assistant and any add-ons i mean technically you can hack it to run other docker containers and services but that is not considered a supported home assistant installation method and i'm not going to recommend that you do it this becomes problematic if you want to use services in your smart home that aren't available as home assistant add-ons for example you might want to use pi hole to block advertisements and tracking cookies on your home network well you might want to use deepstack with your security cameras to recognize faces on your video doorbell at the time of recording these services were not available as home assistant add-ons so you can't install them onto your home assistant operating system in fact pi hold used to be available as an add-on but then got removed and deprecated in favor of a different ad blocking add-on i personally prefer to use piehole and i can't do that if i'm running home assistant os that's why i run home assistant container on top of docker if you're not sure what docker is then check out a video that i recently made where i explain what docker is how it works and why i use it in my smart home i've linked to it in the description below home assistant container is the second method of installing home assistant that will cover in this video create a pocket container running home assistant container it effectively loads the home assistant core application now that's the important difference between the home assistant operating system and the home assistant container versions the container only contains the core home assistant application the core application has everything you need to run the home assistant web interface to add integrations and devices as well as create automations from scratch or using community blueprints the container version doesn't come with the supervisor you're the supervisor now and it's up to you to manage things like backups updates and patches technically there are again ways you can hack the supervisor into a docker container install but this is not a supported installation method for home assistant and i don't recommend it without the supervisor you also don't get access to the add-on store or any add-ons at all but you don't really need add-ons if you're running home assistant in a virtual environment at the end of the day add-ons are just virtual containers themselves so if you're running docker then you have everything you need already to run your own version of add-ons everything that you can get as an add-on can most likely be run in a virtual computer or a docker container in fact you can run far more services as docker containers than you can as home assistant add-ons you do however lose the ability to configure and manage these extra services from inside the home assistant user interface and that is a shame all configuration will now need to be done within each container itself which can be a bit of a pain for this reason i would only really recommend that you run home assistant container if you're already running docker or maybe you started out with home assistant os on a raspberry pi and you're starting to outgrow it you may have noticed that your pie is beginning to creak at the knees and melting itself because you're running home assistant zigbee to mqtt and frigate as add-ons and it's taking longer and longer to reboot backup or upgrade that is exactly what happened to me and i started looking around for alternatives i ended up buying an intel nut computer installing ubuntu and docker on it and now i run home assistant container alongside many other home automation services each in their own separate containers i've never looked back and i don't miss the supervisor add-ons or the quick and easy backup and restore capabilities that come with home assistant os my ubuntu and docker images automatically update to their latest versions every week my entire home assistant and every other docker image that i run gets backed up automatically each day and stored on my google drive i've installed portena which gives me a graphical way to manage all of my docker containers and i've connected vs code directly to my ubuntu server and i can manage the configuration files for all of these services through it i even have a zigbee usb dongle and a coral tpu connected to my nock which can be accessed and used by my zigbee to mqtt and frigate docker containers on top of that i can now run a myriad of services on my computer that aren't available in home assistant add-ons i can spin them up as docker containers test them and throw them away if i find that i don't need them or like them best of all i'm going to teach you how you can do all of this as part of this series make sure that you're subscribed because i'm going to be releasing a ton of videos explaining how you can get a system up and running just like mine i'll show you how to set up docker and home assistant how to migrate from home assistant os and how you can automatically backup and update your system and containers then we'll look at all the different smart home services that i run in docker in more detail what else do you want to see let me know in the comments if you want to come along on this journey then make sure you hit that subscribe button and together we'll make your home smarter

Channel: Home Automation Guy

Views: 82,553

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Id: i72K1wyuTfg

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022