I am James and I am exploring installing Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. Could someone guide me through the installation process step-by-step, including any prerequisites or tips to ensure a smooth setup? I’m particularly interested in any compatibility considerations or common troubleshooting steps during installation. Your insights would be greatly appreciated!
I also gone through this Home Assistant OS 11.1 Installation Issue - Raspberry pi 4BDM but couldn’t find insightful information about it.
A good power supply preferably the official PI one.
A good sd if you are installing on SD card
A spare SD card, in case the first one is faulty.
Preferably install onto a USB SDD.
Follow the guide linked, look at youtube if you must but remember youtube is often out of date.
I followed the official installation guide linked above and installed as Home Assistant Core.
It seems that HA will shut down and need to be manually restarted, I installed Wednesday night and just getting back to it today and I had to restart the python virtual environment and re-run the “hass” command.
Any thoughts as to why this is the case? Am I better off just using the docker?
If you are new to HA install HAOS, you will just end up in a mess unless you understand how to run stuff in docker and the limitations involved with running HA like that. HAOS will just work, and do everything.
Depending on what else you want to run, there are many options. Search proxmox, and add ons which can be run inside HAOS. If you want to run it inside raspian or whatever then look at running HAOS. In a vm.
FWIW, ask twenty different HA users how to set up and utilize HA and you’ll get probably 15 different answers. You should do some research on these forums and external blogs/etc about which setup is best for you.
I’m a very technical guy and I went with HAOS because it’s pretty simple and the closest you’ll get to an appliance (i.e., Vera, Smarthings, etc) with very little management outside of the core system. Doing a Docker install tends to be favored by users who want more control over how granular they can tweak HA - but it’s not for the feint of heart usually. For me that adds an unwanted layer of complexity to my house’s brain.
Aside from these two methods there are others, but they seem to be used far less frequently than HAOS vs Docker. The rest of the consideration are fairly universal to any method, such as rPi vs virtual machine vs dedicated computer, etc.
I think if you are just getting your feet wet then the HAOS method is the simplest way to get started, you can always change to Docker later, but you will likely appreciate the simplicity of things more this way. For me, years into HA, I still have yet to find a good reason for me to consider Docker for HA, although who is to say what that will look like in the future.
Well, years ago there was an oxymoron: “Microsoft works”.
Now I get a deja vu with Hassos.
I flashed it with newest PiImager to a brandnew SD and started my brandnew Pi5.
Well, it “works”. I got a screem and a green prompt “ha >”.
Now I want to configure the software. Looking first for the documentation of HassOs. Oh, I first learnt, it is very special (Why? No rational reason to deviate from vanilla Debian). But where is this special documentation? I wasn’t even able to configure network interfaces and resolver. I found the hint to look for ‘configuration.yaml’. Oh, it isn’t on my SD. But where it is gone?
So if you followed the guide why would you need to configure network interfaces? They are configured during the install. If you login to HA it will start you off with setting up the devices it has discovered.
As long as your RPi is connected to your home network via Ethernet, it will grab a DHCP assigned TCP/IP address from your router. This is the IP address that is shown on the screen if you attach an HDMI monitor to the RPi. In fact, the text on the monitor will tell you the URL to use in your web browser to connect to Home Assistant.
I recommend configuring your router to RESERVE a TCP/IP address for your RPi running HAOS, to prevent the IP address from changing.
100% agree with this!