I’ve installed HA Core on a RPI4 after trying HAOS and being somewhat frustrated by the lack of control there and when an update killed my installation, I thought it was time to try another flavour of HA.
I’m happy with the speed, responsiveness and openness (I much prefer having a proper shell and filesystem to work with) of HA Core but now I’m learning the downsides - no Add-ons, for one.
That’s a pity as most of the functionality appeared to be in the addons.
So, is there some way of gaining the same sort of functionality using HA-Core? What’s the rational behind not allowing add-ons with core? Is this because if people were allowed too much of a good thing, we might be happy?
Because addons are basically docker containers. If you choose core (or container) you are managing the OS and you know where to source equivalent docker containers.
This particular question is asked and answered on this forum about once every three months.
Not unless you install every one of the apps that are run by an add-on on the OS itself.
As noted Add-ons are nothing more than apps that have first been dockerized and then modified further to allow the supervisor to control them.
if you really want to stay with Core then just install those original apps directly on your OS.
But I have another suggestion that you kind of get the benefits of core but with a little extra work for the equivalent to add-ons…
Run HA Container.
it gives you full control over the host OS and also allows you to run the same apps in (non-supervisor controllable version) docker containers.
the only downside is that you need to learn Docker. But once you do that (and it’s not that hard) then you have no limitation in functionality that I know of between Core and a Supervised HA install version where add-ons are concerned.
and if you still want to run those apps on the host instead of in a Docker container then you can still do that too.
I’m doing that right now or my MQTT.
I run HA Container and have every external thing that my HA needs in their own docker containers (zwavejsUI, mariadb, esphome, appdaemon, etc). All except MQTT.
and the only reason I don’t run that in a container is because I already had that setup before I moved from HA Core to HA Container several years ago and it was just easier to leave it there.