NGINX Reverse Proxy and Hassbian to Hass.io

Installation
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Hi,
I’m not entirely sure where to post this. I think this is as good a place as any.

I have been a user of Home Assistant for the last 3 years. I tried Hass.io and found it very limited, buggy and unreliable. I then installed Home Assistant and was on my way. My requirements increased and my config.yaml grew. The whole of my home automation gradually became more complex. After a couple of corrupt SD cards, I began thinking about moving to a NUC instead of the Pi.

At around this time Hassbian was retired and so I thought I’d make the change to a new piece of hardware. As the NUC is very overpowered for HA, I’d also like to run other services on there. Maybe Ghost CMS / WordPress, Lidarr, Radarr etc. Hass.io seems to be stable and very good these days from others reports.

I’m currently still running the Pi and I have Let’sEncrypt set up and DuckDNS. I’ve looked at docker and NGINX reverse proxy as a possible avenue to explore but there’s a lot of information out there and I’ve become a bit lost in all honesty.

What is the best approach to get HA back up and running on the NUC and have the flexibility to introduce the other services when I need?

Do I install Hass.io in a docker container and then use the NGINX add-on to to route traffic to the other services I want?

OR

Do I need to setup NGINX and route traffic through to Hassio and the other dockerised services somehow? As I said, I’m a little bit lost!

In terms of getting Hass.io running as well as Hassbian was, do I just take all of my config files in home/.homeassistant/ directory and copy them to a directory in Hass.io?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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You can run the Hassio installer on the Linux distro of your choice if you want, which means you still have control over the host OS, and have the addons/snapshot capability that the Hassio installer enables. That’s what I do (Raspbian + Hassio). I have other command line tools installed on Raspbian which is why I went that route.

You can use the NGINX proxy manager addon to do that stuff if you want. Also yes, you can just copy over your config files to the new Home Assistant config folder. You can install the Samba addon to do that (which you should anyway, it’s very useful), or move them to the folder another way. When you do the generic Linux install of Hassio, the Home Assistant config folder will be located at

/usr/share/hassio/homeassistant
1 Like
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It’s a matter of preference. Currently all options are available:

  • Home Assistant in Docker (preferably on a Linux OS)
  • HassIO in Docker on a Linux OS
  • HassOS in a virtual machine (any host OS would do)
  • Manual installation in a Linux machine (vm or on physical host) via Python VENV

It’s whatever you want.

Or run NGINX in another docker container or on the host…or whatever you wish.

Nope. Hassio won’t handle the traffic routing. You need a reverse proxy for that.

Yes.

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Yep - know that much… see the title! :wink:

My experience has been that updates occasionally break things in Home Assistant so having all service routed through it does make it a key component of the setup. I would rather have each service running through the Nginx reverse proxy server in its own docker container but this makes setting things up a little more challenging for me. (I’ve only just started with Docker and I’m such a NOOB!).

Thanks for your advice. I know I’m on the right track even if I don’t know how to do it yet. :+1:t2::slightly_smiling_face: