How to set up HA on Rasp Pi headless

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I’m trying to set up HA on a Raspberry Pi 4B headless using ethernet (not WiFi). I first set up RaspOS on the Pi headless according to the instructions on Tom’s Hardware. But then I didn’t know how to install HAOS. I then tried to follow the instructions in Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant. I failed to do this because I couldn’t find an ISO image for HAOS anywhere. So I tried to select the HAOS that Raspberry Pi Imager offered me, but this too failed, because it didn’t offer me the chance to customise the install so that it would run headless.
Can someone please tell me how to do this, or point me to some instructions that explain the process?

Thank you - Rowan

2

I don’t think you need to customize the install for it to run headless (I assume you mean without a keyboard, monitor, mouse, etc.). Just follow the instructions through to the Start Up and Access sections after you get the SD card built.

3

I have now succeeded in getting it working to a basic level. My initial problem was that I was trying to connect to it via SSH and a terminal emulator. I didn’t realize that I needed to connect to it via http.

Thanks for all the help that you all provided - Rowan

4

@rowan.bradley what ended up being the trick here? I am trying to setup a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and have copied the image with the advanced configuration to preconfigure it to connect to my Wifi but even after 30 minutes the pi’s LED still occasionally blinks (booting?) and doesn’t show up on my network (checking via router). I’d really hate to get a HDMI adaptor and keyboard etc just to turn on a switch. Surely there’s a trick to get it to read the config file like other pi OSes?

5

Last week, I had same issue when using Raspberry Pi Imager even though I entered SSID info and enabled SSH in Advanced Install Options. I ended up creating a wpa_supplicant.conf that contains SSID info on the SD card after OS was installed but before inserting it into Pi Zero.

I also added an empty SSH file (no extension) to SD card.

After doing both, Zero immediately connected to wifi and I was able to SSH in to it.

6

Thanks for the reply! Nice to hear, it seems like these custom settings aren’t necessarily picked up by HA so I’m curious but glad it worked for you!

I couldn’t mount the SD card on my mac{ after writing HA to it so I wasn’t able to write the conf file. How did you mount the image after writing it?