As i understand it well, all addon are docker containers, so a container cannot mess up your HA installation. Am I right?
Everything I run is a container.
HA, MQTT, Piper, ESPHome, Whisper, Frigate, Node Red and Others. All docker containers.
Not sure if they are equal to add-ons as I don’t use add-ons, but I have never found anything missing that I needed.
Home assistant manages containers using add-ons. It will create, drop, update them but they are essentially docker containers.
Under the hood, add-ons are container images published to a container registry like GitHub container registry and Docker Hub. Developers can create GitHub repositories that contain multiple add-ons for easy sharing with the community.
Generally correct, except where the add-on/container has access to the config folder. For example the SSH add-ons allow you to mess with everything in /config
It still could, depends on your definition of “mess up”. If your installation is an HAOS, running add-ons, that would be fine.
But if you force some docker containers somehow onto the HAOS, via methods outside of the add-on route, then your install (specifically the HA Supervisor) might not be happy, and will flag your install as unhealthy, and then block various updates.
Your HAOS would still run, so not messed up per se.
Your HAOS would not get updated, does that count as messed up?
As such, see above, people at most would say “they are essentially the same”, in the sense that under the hood they use the same thing.
But are they equal (as in identical)? That becomes debatable.
Running, for example, portainer is likely to enable you to bugger up your system. Watchtower too.
All thanks for the clear answers. I am running HAOS and want to install some containers like the unifi add-on or ad-guard. I’ll give it a try.
If you are running haos then why not use unifi and ad-guard addons?
In that case, you likely do not need to roll those containers your own onto HAOS – there is already HAOS add-on for either.
… and in that context, yes, addons are indeed equal to docker containers. You will get unifi controller and AdGuard in the end.
at the end i indeed installed the addons, and it is working flawless en really easy to install. thanks