My (outdated) Quick Start for Home Assistant Core on FreeNAS 11.2

Snow · January 11, 2020, 6:36pm

I think I may just do a fresh install. Thanks! I just did a install for node red and wow. I am used to having to manual do jails, scripts, permissions, ect, and user:groups. I also use medusa and am the current author of the freenas guide on the forums. I would like to Set it up just like you did, to make it simple for people. Is there a guide you could point me to? Also if you did not mind if I had any questions if I troubled you for info on getting a GitHub wget install setup for the jail.

troy · January 11, 2020, 9:13pm

Are you talking about how to remake your medusa guide like mine and create the install script for it? I’m not sure what guide your asking about? I’d be willing to help you out if I can but I’m not exactly sure what your asking about

Snow · January 12, 2020, 6:19am

To use the scripted install like the wget -O /tmp/pkglist.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com command. but for my jail/setup. I am not sure what to look up to do it. Also how to set it up like that, I would like to change my guide from manual to auto / scripted like your guide for 11.3.

troy · January 12, 2020, 2:17pm

To get you started, the latest FreeNAS docs cover this pretty well.

My script is kind of a hybrid because it will work in both a plugin-jail and in a standard-jail.

Is this your guide?

It looks likes this will be pretty easy to make a script for but I think it will be a better topic on FreeNAS forums. If you have questions either make a post in the FreeNAS forums and tag me in it or you can contact me on either forum using PM

EDIT: I also updated the command to install the 11.3 plugin on FreeNAS 11.2.

I reinstalled FreeNAS 11.2-U7 in a VM to test it out and everything seems to ok. I only notice one weird discrepancy in the HA dev panel it shows as running 11.2

But at the console I can verify this is infact using 11.3

That does not seem very serious but I think it proves it is not perfect when using 11.3 plugins on FreeNAS 11.2 host

Snow · January 12, 2020, 6:12pm

Thanks Man Yes thats me. When I reset my Home assistant jail just Now, Config and HA dashboard will not load. I click on it and it just a blank page.

troy · January 12, 2020, 6:28pm

how about?

service configurator status
service appdaemon status

If those are running can you go directly to configurator on port 3218

It is the same ip address as your Home Assistant so for example if HA is 192.168.1.100 you could try to reach the configurator directly at http://192.168.1.100:3218

How about HA dashboard on port 5050 http://192.168.1.100:5050
Again replace 192.168.1.100 with your HA ip address

If those are working directly then it’s just a matter of fixing the iframe entry in the HA configuration. If you used the 11.2 script with my example config you will find those iframe entries in homeassistant/configuration.yaml If you used the updated 11.3 script, you will find those entries in homeassistant/packages/freenas_plugin.yaml

Snow · January 12, 2020, 7:05pm

Yes I can navigate to them :). Ok where do I go to find the Iframe is that a config in the jail? or via the config from Homeassistant. see I did not have static ips set up for all the jails. I was about to edit yaml stuff like you say to in your guide. After I changed the ips It would no longer load in the UI.

Snow · January 12, 2020, 7:15pm

That worked thanks a lot dude.

Snow · January 13, 2020, 8:27pm

configurator works now, I did a new install for reasons. Now app daemon & HA dash will not load config is correct . I try to start app daemon in HomAssi it says its starting, so when I do status appdaemon is not running. I made sure it was installed. Not sure what to do it has done this to me on 2 install’s

troy · January 13, 2020, 9:08pm

I just figured out appdaemon 4.0.0 is released. We need some extra options in the configuration file. I’m working to update my github now. No need to wait for me though

In general for troubleshooting, you can check the daemon logs. These output what you would see if you started the application straight from the console. They are located inside the jail in /var/log/SERVICE_deamon.log Where SERVICE is appdaemon or homeassistant ect.

So for appdaemon to view the last 50 lines of the log you can use tail

iocage console homeassistant
tail -n50 /var/log/appdaemon_daemon.log

I can already tell you though
Edit /home/hass/appdaemon/conf/appdaemon.yaml. We need to add entries for

  latitude:
  longitude:
  elevation: 
  time_zone:

Edit: I see there are more changes in appdaemon 4.0.

Best have a look here to get things sorted.
https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONFIGURE.html
~~I reading through now. I’ll will update with the remaining changes when it’s working. Shouldn’t be too long.~~

So here is my fully updated appdaemon.yaml

## Create & Add a Long Live Access Token to secrets
## https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONFIGURE.html#secrets
secrets: /home/hass/homeassistant/secrets.yaml

# https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INSTALL.html#configuration
appdaemon:
  # disable_apps: 1
  latitude: 41.029885
  longitude: -80.614263
  elevation: 321
  time_zone: America/New_York
  threads: 10
  production_mode: true
  app_dir: /home/hass/appdaemon/apps
  plugins:
    HASS:
      type: hass
      ha_url: http://127.0.0.1:8123
      token: !secret appdaemon_token
#admin:
http:
  url: http://127.0.0.1:5050
hadashboard:
  dashboard_dir: /home/hass/appdaemon/dashboards

After these changes appdaemon should start

This looks neat. When it’s more complete I’ll enable it by default.

The Admin Interface, new in 4.0 is a new front end to AppDaemon that allows you to monitor it’s inner workings such as thread activity, registered callbacks and entities. Over time it is expected to evolve into a full management tool for AppDaemon allowing the user to configure, troubleshoot and monitor all of AppDaemon’s functions.

I’ve included the entry already in the example configuration. Just remove the comment (#) on this line #admin: and restart appdaemon. The HA Dashboard iframe will link to the new admin panel

Snow · January 14, 2020, 12:39am

appdaemon is still not running. even If I manually start it. I reloaded Every thing to see if it was a HomAssi problem.

## Create & Add a Long Live Access Token to secrets
## https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONFIGURE.html#secrets
secrets: /home/hass/homeassistant/secrets.yaml

# https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INSTALL.html#configuration
appdaemon:
# disable_apps: 1
  latitude: 42.932780
  longitude: -87.987600
  elevation: 738
  time_zone: America/chicago
 threads: 10
  production_mode: true
  app_dir: /home/hass/appdaemon/apps
  plugins:
    HASS:
      type: hass
      ha_url: http://127.0.0.1:8123
      token: !secret appdaemon_token
admin:
http:
  url: http://127.0.0.1:5050
hadashboard:
  dashboard_dir: /home/hass/appdaemon/dashboards

troy · January 14, 2020, 12:45am

what’s the output from

tail -n50 /var/log/appdaemon_daemon.log

EDIT: I just copy and pasted your exact config you posted to the configurator and there is a format error

Please check line 12.

threads should be lined up with the lines above and below

Snow · January 14, 2020, 12:51am

>  Error loading configuration
> ERROR parser says
> ERROR   in "<unicode string>", line 12, column 2:
>      threads: 10
>      ^
> ERROR expected <block end>, but found '<block mapping start>' while parsing a block mapping

Also when I Run the config chk in homassis I get.

nvalid config for [panel_iframe]: expected a dictionary for dictionary value @ data['panel_iframe']['elevation']. Got 738
expected a dictionary for dictionary value @ data['panel_iframe']['latitude']. Got 42.93278
expected a dictionary for dictionary value @ data['panel_iframe']['longitude']. Got -87.9876
expected a dictionary for dictionary value @ data['panel_iframe']['time_zone']. Got 'America/Chicago'. (See /home/hass/homeassistant/configuration.yaml, line 24). Please check the docs at https://home-assistant.io/integrations/panel_iframe/

troy · January 14, 2020, 12:55am

Your configuration works after I correct the indentation on line 12. See my edit above

I do not have the second error. Can I please your entry for the iframe?

Snow · January 14, 2020, 1:41am

Was I not supposed to add it also to configuration.yaml ?

  #tasmoadmin:
    #title: TasmoAdmin
    #icon: mdi:creation
    #url: http://192.168.2.35
  
  latitude: 42.932780
  longitude: -87.987600
  elevation: 738 
  time_zone: America/Chicago 
  
  
## https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/installation/#configuration
#zwave:
#  usb_path: /dev/cuaU0
#  network_key: !secret zwave_key

appdaemon is running.

troy · January 14, 2020, 1:48am

No. For appdaemon this only goes to appdaemon.yaml

I see if appdaemon running you figured that out already

Just a short time ago Home Assistant had these exact entries but they have been removed in favor of the new onboarding process. I bet that’s where it might seem confusing

Snow · January 14, 2020, 1:58am

Yeah It was thanks for the help hopefully helps any one else with prob

axg20202 · January 14, 2020, 1:57pm

Hi Troy. I’ve been running HA using your method for some time now and it seems to work very well (also thanks to your very responsive support!). However, being a complete noob I still can’t get my head around the whole venv vs Hassio vs Docker stuff. I come unstuck when installing new features because they are often for a different environment, so the instructions don’t apply to your method of running HA on Freenas. For example, I’d like to use EspHome, but I have no idea how to approach making it run on this Freenas install. This issue is bound to come up again each time I want to try an integration that doesn’t quite line up easily with the venv approach. Could you humour me and explain how this works and how I could approach installing things like EspHome? Is it simply a case of running pip install esphome within the iocage jail for HA?

troy · January 14, 2020, 3:02pm

Hi @axg20202

No worries. I know it can be confusing. I try to compile a little explanation with more details in the future

What I have done for homeassistant, configurator, and appdaemon, was to follow the instruction for each respective virtualenv install on Linux. Now with this mind FreeNAS is not Linux so the commands are not always exactly the same but they are usually very close. Translating from Linux to FreeNAS is something I can try my best to help you with on a case by case basis but I don’t have a definitive guide for doing this.

Well my friend, you are in luck ESPHome has already been requested and is included in the updated script for FreeNAS 11.3. It’s a few extra steps but I see no reason that you could not follow these step to add ESPHome to your existing install. I’m going to also include these first steps to “snapshot” you jail before you continue. This way if anything goes wrong we can restore the snapshot to undo any changes

This is assumes your jail name is homeassistant.

Begin from you FreeNAS console

iocage snapshot -n no_esphome homeassistant

You can now continue installing ESPHOME

iocage console homeassistant
pkg install -y gcc wget

wget -O /usr/local/etc/rc.d/esphome https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tprelog/iocage-homeassistant/11.3-RELEASE/overlay/usr/local/etc/rc.d/esphome
chmod +x /usr/local/etc/rc.d/esphome

wget -O /root/post_install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tprelog/iocage-homeassistant/11.3-RELEASE/post_install.sh
chmod +x /root/post_install.sh

/root/post_install.sh esphome

You will still need to add a panel_iframe entry to your HA config for ESPHome after it’s installed.

Yes you are likely to face this but with each experience this should gradually get easy. I know this can become very frustrating in the beginning (It was for me) but I would encourage you to stick with if time and patience allows. Let me know if you need help, I’ll do my best to assistant as mush as I can. The short answer to your final question is yes, basically I am just creating a separate virtualenvs for application I’m adding to the Home Assistant jail.

axg20202 · January 14, 2020, 5:13pm

As usual, excellent help. Thanks for taking the time! I will give it a shot - currently have a
NodeMCU-based multisensor that is itching to join my network and start misreporting like I know it will. Good idea re the snapshot.