I was ready to give up on Home Assistant... until I moved the database!

[Michael_Davydov (Nix)]

@krash

And that’s where i always loose it
Hassio “simple” ssh only has several commands you can use, and i doubt it will let you edit any files.
As for going the debian-> hass-io it seems like too much of a pain to do it compared to straightforward hassio installation.
I’ll need someone already on hassio to walk me through it step by step, until then, ill keep depending on amazon.

Well, not to panic Just approach it step by step and it’s much easier than you’d think. It’s always scary to see when you see a long list of instructions, but if you just give it some more time it’s much easier I’ll try to make it simple here.

Part 1 - Going Ubuntu

So first of all I’d like to address the “it’s less straightforward” thing. It’s not. It’s almost the same. What you need to do is:

Step 1 - install Ubuntu

Full guide - Raspberry Pi | Ubuntu MATE I’m just making it all shorter here

0. Get monitor and keyboard ready, you’ll need them for the first run
1. Go to official raspberrypi website and see what OSes are readily available for flashing. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ Go for Ubuntu MATE if you’d like to connect Monitor and Keyboard and Mouse to RPI and set it all up this way. Go for Ubuntu Server if you’d like to administer it remotely.
2. Flash it on an SD Card using the same approach you did with HassOS - Win32DiskImager or balenaEtcher or whatever works for it. They have instructions here: Raspberry Pi | Ubuntu MATE
3. Connect monitor and keyboard to your Pi. Insert SD card. Power on.
4. Go over the install wizard where you create user and password

First step done.

Step 1.1. Install and setup SSH

SSH is not enabled by default, you need to install it using sudo apt install openssh-server. It will run on port 22 by default, and you will be able to login with your user and password. Do not port forward this outside of your lan for security purposes.

Step 2. Install Hass.IO

Log into your Ubuntu terminal over SSH or just open “Terminal” app if you’re using desktop.
To run commands with admin privilegies on ubuntu you use sudo prefix or you can log into root account using sudo su command.

Go over here and run commands that are listed there, line by line: Installation - Home Assistant

Done. You have installed Hass.Io on Ubuntu

Step 3. Webmin, optional

If you’d like to have a web UI to administer your RPI host you can use Webmin. It’s web panel that has the most features among anything I could find, alternatives being Ajenti or Cockpit, they all lack something. You can use webmin to browse filesystem, edit text files, format and partition disks, mount disks, control services and much much more.

To install Webmin you can follow Debian instructions (Ubuntu is derivative of Debian): Downloading and Installing | Webmin just make sure to run the dependency installation command first. They messed the order up in instructions On purpose I suppose, but anyway.

And there you go. You now have full control over your host and you’re not limited by anything hassOS does. I’ve been running it like this on a Debian VM for about a year now, no issues with updates or any important addons. Some addons dont work, sure, but those are like SSH addon… Why do you need an SSH addon if you can connect to your host without it? Other addons like MQTT, nginx, etc should all work fine with this method of installation.

PART 2 - Sticking with HASSOS

I started to write it up but then double checked the guide you linked, it should actually keep you covered on how to connect to HassOS host over SSH.

First step and task here is to get SSH access and be able to edit fstab file. For that you’ll need to run command nano /etc/fstab or sudo nano /etc/fstab and see if it works.

I’m starting to get a feeling that HassOS may be stripped down so much that it all might just be impossible to do after all. If they don’t include text editor like nano or vim or something AND dont include any package manager (like apt) then it’s just not worth it at that point and… Well, HassOS should then just die I suppose. Maybe when Hass is at 1.0 and all can be controlled through UI it might work, but not now.

Conclusion

I guess that what I can summarize after looking into this a bit more is that HassOS should only be used for very light installations and maybe initial look into Hass. It MUST be then replaced with some other installation method like the one described above. It may require additional steps and some learning curve to it, but it’s well worth it in the long run.

I hope they will resolve all these issues, like making adjustments to logging and db so it won’t bog SD card down, maybe modifying OS to log to RAM instead and dump it to file system once in a while, but not constantly? Maybe doing something with database so it only logs certain things by default, like sensors, and you need to enable everything else. Or just advising users to use some other Pi alternative, and not RPI. As much as I love RPI and use it for different projects - it’s not a good home for hass.

Disclaimer

This is all just my personal opinion, I’m not associated with Home assistant devs in any way, I’m just a long time user of hass with a modest hass system, linux amateur and tinkerer, who happens to run a Proxmox server with like two dozen services on it. I only entered linux like 3-4 years ago myself. But just can’t stop falling down this rabbit hole.