Hi everyone,
I’m currently using Home Assistant in VirtualBox on a Linux server, but I’m experiencing a lot of issues due to unexpected crashes. The virtual machine stays up, but it’s completely inaccessible and unresponsive.
It might be caused by some integrations that are crashing Home Assistant, but I’m not sure. I’d like to switch to a Docker installation, also because when I restart the server, the service sometimes doesn’t start automatically and I have to manually access the server to launch it. With Docker, services usually start up automatically, which is a big plus.
Is it more complicated to handle DNS and other configurations with Docker?
Does it cause more problems when using Cloudflare for remote access?
Are there any major downsides to switching?
Individual docker containers. Addons are just special case containers. You would get the docker version of whatever addon you’re looking for. So ensuing they’re available would be part of your planning
ok, then I think I remove some stuff from my installation and try to move it to a different vm.
Finally I will go with yellow or green if nothing works
If you move platform consider an x64 powered minipc instead of a pi, yellow or green. Pi lost the price performance battle a long time ago. You get way more compute for your money.
most add-ons/docker containers provide extra functionality outside of HA that HA then ties into to leverage that functionality.
take for example zwavejs.
all the add-on does is create a zwave server that you configure access to within HA. the docker container does exactly the same thing and you will have to tell HA to use it the same way you would the add-on. there might be an extra step or two but it’s usually nothing too much more complicated than running an add-on.
the only difference is that with add-ons there is a dedicated method in HA to install them on your server (not necessarily to connect them to HA tho), configure them and update them as needed. in regular docker you’ll need to do that outside of HA yourself. But again it’s not that difficult.
Do you mind to pinpoint some tutorial/guide that you used?
Im trying right now, and the creation and boot is super fast but I have some devices that rely on MQTT mosquito, HA skills and other addons
Thanks
Once it’s working, move to docker-compose as it makes the setup repeatable.
I run HA, zwavejsui, MQTT and MariaDB as containers.
I started with the HA container running in host networking mode. Later on I setup a docker network and put all the containers on this. This way I could spin up multiple HA system. Eventually I moved HA back to the host network as there were too many things that would not work well (Sonos, iphonedetect)
Docker-compose allows you to describe your containers, folders, devices and dependencies in a config file. This makes it super easy to rip down and stand back up.
Yesterday I did install docker compose and test it out… Really helpful.
Never heard about a docker network, gpt said that is like a network where you can have all your containers and refer to it with a name instead of ip. The downside of this is that some integration need a real network stuff in order to work (in my case I have a lot of integrations of different brand).
So the hosting networking mode is just the typical/standard network? Boot the docker with port:port/tcp right?
I have zigbee, mqtt, esphome, some cinese stuff, meross, ikea (zigbee), other cinese stuff. Not too many protocol though
but I have some devices that rely on MQTT mosquito, HA skills and other addons