I use Home Assistant for about 3 years now on Raspberry Pi 3B+. I use docker-compose to manage: HA, MQTT server (mosquito), portainer and nginx. To access my HA from outside the home network I use custom domain, and nginx to route the traffic on the Raspberry Pi. Furthermore, I keep all docker containers, docker-compose and HA config in GitHub repo, and deploy it using Azure Pipelines. I’ve developed all my config using HA addon for VS Code, pushed it to repo and let Azure Pipelines do the work with validation and uploading to the Raspberry Pi. Also, I use HACS for not existing components that I need.
I started to see that HA is moving to more UI config with integrations, blueprints etc. which requires changes on the server where I keep the config, and I need additional work to keep it consistent with my config on Github. As I deleted or moved my custom docker containers to other solutions, I started wondering if this approach which I have is really good for the need.
The options which I consider:
- Do not change anything, keep part of the manual config on Github, and the UI only on RPi and backup the whole SD card or only the HASS config using custom scripts which I did
- Move to the Home Assistant OS and leverage the built-in backup or use custom addon to upload backup to the cloud storage. Keep part of the config on GitHub, or move to the SAMBA add-on to edit the config locally using VS Code. Things that are worrying me in moving to the HA OS:
- is it possible to use the port forwarding in the HA installed with HA OS? Or only option will be to use port forwarding from 443 → 8123 on router?
- Is there any hassle with HACS on HA OS?
- The HA OS Supervisor uses Docker, could the custom Docker container be deployed to the HomeAssistant OS?
Maybe there is another option that I cannot think of. Could you help me decide which path I should go on with my HomeAssistant journey?