Hi,
Looking at Home Assistant documentation on installation, there seems to be no instructions for installing on plain old Linux/Ubuntu. Its either R.Pi or a set of specific vm images only. Why is that? Are there up to date instructions anywhere for installing the latest version of Home Assistant on Ubuntu Server?
Thank you, very much appreciated. I came to Home Assistant a year ago, after some months of struggling, I gave up. Now I’m back and again find things very confusing.
I’m 24 hours back trying Home Assistant and I find it more confusing than ever.
The proliferation of different install methods made it impossible for the devs to support every method. See ADR0012. Debian is the officially supported Linux flavour as long as strict guidelines are adhered to. Other distros are not officially supported but will work in most cases, you only get community support though.
Yes but it is now called Home Assistant (OS).
Up to you. If you want an easy to maintain “appliance like” install with supervised addons, yes. If you need to tinker with the base OS then one of the other install methods may suit you better.
You might also prefer to do a “Home Assistant Core” install, which is one of the supported types, but just does not include the Supervisor (I’m not even sure what Supervisor is/does).
Basically, it’s a Python Virtual Environment (venv) in which HA lives and runs. The instructions for setting it up are for a Raspberry Pi, but are just as applicable to any Debian-based GNU-Linux.
The venv insulates the HA instance from OS-delivered upgrades to things like Python version and libs. You have to update the venv at times of your choosing (rather than being surprised and potentially break HA when the OS does an upgrade of those items), by creating a new venv, repeating the install steps for HA, and copying the config directory over to it.
This pattern has served me well using HA for many years now. Couldn’t be happier.
The second best thing to running supervised HA is in my opinion to run Home Assistant Core in a docker container. It makes for easy upgrades and no problems with dependencies and python version upgrades etc. You may then also run other applications in docker such as influxdb, grafana, node-red, appdaemon, nginx etc. There should be plenty of guides on the forum for this.
There is a web UI for docker called portainer which makes managing and upgrading docker containers really easy.
Here is the official guide which worked “out of the box” for me. https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/docker/.
May I ask on what hardware your ubuntu machine is running? There are some guides for making a supervised install on an Intel NUC.
Ive been down that road. Home Assistant would not let me install any addons. No Supervisor. No idea why. It was my first time to realise that there was such a concept as supervised and non-supervised. I really find it hard to understand why the developers are not supporting a version for a major OS, at least Ubuntu 18 and maybe 20. As it is, theyre only supporting installs on sbc’s. Baffling. To date, over the past year, all my experiences of Home Assistant involve hours of searching trying to solve issues, and overcoming unexpected paradigms. I wish they’d bring some usability people (ordinary end users) to the team. I see some youtubers commenting on this lately also.
They are. Debian, not it’s derivatives, like Ubuntu.
Not really all that baffling. Everything is based on the efforts of volunteers. The core development team serves as gatekeeper to ensure that everything submitted by volunteers, and incorporated into the product, is functional and can be supported (by them). They have stated they don’t have the resources to test against every possible Linux distro so they have narrowed the field to Debian.
There are many opinions but the project improves due to contributions (i.e. help other users solve problems, write/correct documentation, report bugs, submit new integrations or enhance existing functionality, etc).
For your entertainment, here’s an allegory: Leaving Home Assistant, not worth the headaches! - #22 by 123
I second this.
The major benefit of supervised Is that the system will allow you to install add ons which are essentially other docker containers.
If you are keen to go down the Ubuntu path then installing the home assistant core docker container is not that hard and you can then you can add whatever other docker containers you would like.
This is the way I do it anyway 