Bluetooth speaker for Dockerized install

I’ve got a bluetooth speaker handy and was thinking it would be perfect for Home Assistant and TTS (and I don’t have another good use for it).

Curious if anyone has done this and has directions for using a bluetooth audio device to for Home Assistant in docker… In particular how to deal with a pairing the device. I’m already passing the bluetooth dongle into the docker container.

I was initially thinking of pairing on the host and passing /dev/snd into the container, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea since I’m already using bluetooth in HA, and suspect using a bluetooth dongle on two “hosts” isn’t a good strategy.

I struggled with this for almost 2 months, but couldn’t get bluetooth running inside Docker (running HA on Rancher).

Eventually, I bought a Google Chromecast audio and got it up and running within a few minutes. I suggest you do the same and avoid a lot of headaches…