Homeassistant as NAS with SimpleNas Addon

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Simple NAS – Turn your Home Assistant into a full NAS with Web GUI

Hi everyone!

I built a Home Assistant add-on that turns your Raspberry Pi (or any HA hardware) into a simple NAS with Samba file sharing and a built-in web interface — no SSH or config files needed.

Why?

I wanted a straightforward way to share USB drives connected to my Raspberry Pi 5 running HA OS, without the complexity of existing Samba add-ons. I needed something where I could plug in a drive, create a share, manage users — all from within Home Assistant.

Features

  • Samba file server (SMB/CIFS) — access your shares from Windows, macOS, Linux, and other apps like Nextcloud
  • Web GUI integrated in HA — manage everything via Ingress, no separate web interface needed
  • Drive management — detect, mount, and unmount USB drives directly from the GUI (supports ext4, NTFS, exFAT, btrfs, XFS, FAT32)
  • Share management — create, edit, and delete Samba shares with a few clicks
  • Users & Groups — create Samba users with passwords, organize them in groups, assign per-share access
  • Network discovery — your NAS automatically appears in Windows Explorer (WS-Discovery), Linux file managers (Avahi/mDNS), and macOS Finder
  • Dark/Light theme — matches the HA look and feel, switchable in the header
  • System protection — warning dialog when trying to mount/unmount system partitions (sda)
  • Persistent configuration — all shares, users, groups, and mounts survive add-on restarts and updates
  • Configurable web port — change the GUI port if 8099 conflicts with something else

Screenshots

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Quick Start

Installation:

  1. Go to Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store
  2. Click ⋮ → Repositories
  3. Add: https://github.com/gregorwolf1973/EasyNas-HASSIO-Addon
  4. Find Simple NAS → Install → Start → Open

Usage:

  1. Plug in a USB drive
  2. Go to Drives tab → click Mount on your partition
  3. Go to Shares tab → create a new share pointing to the mounted drive
  4. Go to Users tab → create a Samba user
  5. Access your share from any device: \\YOUR-HA-IP\sharename

Works with Nextcloud

If you run Nextcloud on HA, you can mount Simple NAS shares as external storage:

  • External Storage → SMB/CIFS
  • Host: your HA IP
  • Share: the exact share name from Simple NAS
  • Authentication: Username and Password (use a Samba user you created in Simple NAS)

Tip: Use “Username and Password” authentication instead of “Global credentials” — it’s more reliable.

Technical Details

  • Based on the official HA base image (Alpine Linux)
  • Samba 4.x with SMB2/SMB3
  • Flask web server with HA Ingress support
  • Avahi (mDNS) + WSDD (WS-Discovery) for network browsing
  • Privileged mount operations via FIFO daemon
  • Architectures: aarch64 (RPi 4/5), amd64, armv7

Links

Feedback

This is my first public HA add-on. I’d love to hear your feedback, bug reports, and feature requests — either here or as GitHub issues.

If you find it useful, a :star: on GitHub would be much appreciated!

1 Like
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Hi I just switched over to Simple NAS from the standard Samba NAS add-on, and the difference is night and day.

Your version is so much easier to handle, especially for managing external drives. Most importantly for me: it runs significantly better with macOS. Finder picks up the shares instantly and the connection is much more stable than what I experienced before.

Läuft super! Really appreciate you putting this together and making NAS functionality accessible for everyone.

One quick question: Is there (or could there be) an option to exclude specific files? I’d love to prevent macOS from cluttering the shares with its ‘junk’ files (like .DS_Store, ._* files, or .TemporaryItems).