Home Assistant Container Addons

Installation
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Okay… Where to begin.

I’m venturing into Linux, Docker, Home Assistant for some months now. Even though I have affinity with programming (I’m a freelance developer) I never understood all the flavours of Home Assistant, until now.
As I understand, you got basically 4 methods to run it.

I’m running Home Assistant, from whenever I started, on Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 inside a Docker installation. I never looked at the supervisor stuff, nor the add-ons. But now I would like to have those add-ons. Looking at the bottom of this page, it says:

Add-ons are only available if you’ve used the Home Assistant installer. If you installed Home Assistant using any other method then you cannot use add-ons (but you can achieve the same result manually).

The question is simple: how can this be done manually?
I’m running: homeassistant/home-assistant:2020.12.1
Let’s assume I want to have the Samba addon running on my docker installation…

Side note: I downloaded the .qcow2 image and installed that one on my Proxmox server, it works as expected, but I cannot easily backup my old install on docker and restore it on that one. Copying the files manually, also does not show me my lovelace dashboard as how I had it before. I also would not like to go this route as I need an additional VM just for Home Assistant. Now everything is centralised on that Ubuntu VM (pihole, nodered, zoneminder, guacamole, heimdall, portainer, …).

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‘Manually’ == running your own docker container. Usually its as easy as typing the name of the addon + ‘docker’ in to your favourite search engine and finding the original docker container that the addon is based on.

But copying over your configuration should work fine, make sure you copy all the files including the hidden files from your old (docker) install, and place them in the config directory for your new (hassos) install.

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I choose a slightly different path to install HA on a ubuntu 20 kvm virtual host (in bridge mode). It gives me the benefits of the add-ons as well as the flexibility to add my own things outside the VM. Is this the right approach? Time will tell…