New HASS.IO, Set up Google Mini with it

I’m pretty sure people keep asking this, but I got a Rasp Pi 3. Installed HASS.IO. I got DuckDNS set up so that I can see my site publicly with HTTPS.

I just bought a Google Mini and figure there was an easy way to set it up to work with HASS.IO.

I saw the link on how to set it up. It is like a 10 step process. Does this mean I have to some how create a developer addition or something at Google in order to set up Google Mini to work with my HA? Man, it just seemed like a lot of steps to get it working, but was not sure

I think you are getting confused between Google Assistant integration and a simple Google Home device inclusion.

To include the Google Home Mini all you need to do is include the following code to your configuration.yaml

media_player:
  - platform: cast
    name: Whatever Name Home Mini
    host: 192.168.0.21 #<---use whatever IP address you have assigned it. ie: force a static IP address for it in your router

If you want to ask the Google Home Mini to control your HA devices, then yes you will need to follow the long Google Assistant process.

You are correct. I fiddle around and was able to get the Google Mini to turn my light on and off. Thought there was a whole lot more stuff I had to do, but it was pretty easy!

It depends if you want Google Mini to control those devices directly (as in adding them to the Google Home app) or via HA. Adding them via HA requires the long, not so easy process, whereas getting Google Home to control them directly is easy. The difference is that not all devices will be able to be controlled by Google Home directly, such as z-wave devices you could have as part of a HA install. By doing the long Google Assistant process, anything you link to HA can be controlled by Google Home irrelevant of what technology it is (ie: wifi, bluetooth, z-wave, zigbee) as opposed to Gogle Home which can only control wifi connected devices.

You’re lucky your lights have ‘native’ google assistant support. If you have other devices without native support then you need to do the full setup procedure like sparkydave said.

I have a question about the the instructions (Google Assistant - Home Assistant), which says:

To use Google Assistant, your Home Assistant configuration has to be externally accessible with a hostname and SSL certificate.

But it doesn’t say what the minimum requirements are for being “externally accessible” and have HA <> Google work. Most discussions here in the forum seem to say to forward router ports 80 and 443, but don’t explain why.

For example, does Google really care about port 80? Or is it just that everyone is running a certbot for the ACME protocol (Caddy/NGIX/Let’s Encrypt) which expects uses port 80 to do the automated cert handling?

You need either a fixed IP address from your ISP or you need to set up a dyndns name - most people here use Duckdns which is free and works perfectly well.
Port 80 and Port 443 forwarding are needed by LetsEncrypt in order to issue an SSL certificate. Google Assistant only works when you have an https address. After getting the certificate you can disable the port forwarding for 90 days until you want to renew the certificate for the next 90 days. (Not sure if LetsEncrypt needs 443 anymore…) You will probably have to port forward 8123 as well (permanently)