I’m slowly getting to grips with the topic of “home automation” and wanted to install “Home Assistant” as a container in Docker, not on a Raspberry Pi, but on a server that mainly runs OpenMediaVault. In search of a tutorial I came across the following overview and am now a bit irritated:
from this overview, described in more detail in the “Compare Installation Methods” paragraph, it appears that “Supervisor”, “Add-ons” and “Backups” are not supported in a container.
This would be the first system, after ioBroker and openHAB, that would not run properly in a container.
Can someone tell me something more specific about this?
Also, does anyone happen to know a good/current/complete guide that I can use for installation?
HA runs properly in a container. It just doesn’t support those functions by running the “Home Assistant Container” installation method.
If you need those functions then you will need to run the “Home Assistant Supervised” installation method.
Both installation methods will result in “Home Assistant Core” being created and run in Docker.
The difference is that a “Supervised” install will also create additional containers (the most important will be the “supervisor” container) that allows HA to manage it’s own docker environment to allow for the various functionalities you mentioned above.
If you don’t need/want those functions then just install “Home Assistant Container”. It’s the install method I use and so do many others and we get along just fine without the supervisor.
HA has grown up from being an application to an ecosystem.
The HassOs and Supervised installation methods implement that ecosystem: above Home Assistant, the application, those installation methods adds “addons”, which are basically container themselves integrating common open-source applications (MQTT via Mosquitto, Tailscale for VPN, Nginx for reverse-proxy, …) into the ecosystem. They also implement builtin backup, monitoring, upgrading, …
The Container and Core installation methods are for Home Assistant alone. They are not limited in any way but assume that all the tasks described above are done outside of the scope of HA (you do your backups, monitoring, installing of 3rd parties, … by yourself)
Basically, the first 2 are for the general user, and do not require in-depth technical knowledge.
The last 2 are for techies at ease with tinkering with a Linux system.
All installation methods (besides Core) use containers exclusively.
