How to auto Launch Home Assistant on Mac with Virtual Box VM help

Installation
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I have a headless Mac Mini server dedicated to Home Assistant and Homebridge. I have tried without success to figure out how to have HA launch after a reboot of the Mac. I was hoping there is a clear tutorial how to either launch Virtual Box on the Mac. Or I’m open to installation of HA via pip or some other means. I’ve tried the pip method but that hasn’t worked for me either in getting it installed. I am not a hacker so I really need a step by step guide here. My Mac is running Catalina if that matters. I would think this would be a common need but I could not find any clear guides on setting this up. I really will appreciate any help here.

Thanks

Bob Silver

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I know nothing about MACs but this is how I do it on Windows start up.

This command inside a startup.cmd file called by scheduler on startup.

“C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe” startvm HomeAssistant --type headless

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Well I found an incredibly simple way to launch the HA VM on reboot. If you go into Mac System Prefs / Users and Groups and select Login Items you can add programs to start on log in. I located the Home Assistant VM and added the Virtual Machine file and now when the Mac reboots HA starts with it. It doesnt start in headless mode but thats okay.

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@BobSilver Thanks for this – I was struggling to get this working via plist files and getting errors I didn’t understand. I don’t care about headless so this worked great for me too.

For anyone else who might come across this, I found a file at:
/Users/username/VirtualBox VMs/HomeAssistant/HomeAssistant.vbox
where “username” is your username and “HomeAssistant” is the name of your virtual machine.
I just dragged that HomeAssistant.vbox file to the Login Items panel in System Preferences > Users & Groups: CleanShot 2022-02-19 at 12.05.53 · CleanShot Cloud

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