Questions about Hass.io as an OS

Archive HASSbian
1

So far I have always been running Hassio in a Docker container. Yesterday I had to reinstall my Rpi3 so I installed Raspbian Lite and then proceeded to install Hass.io through Docker as usual. Although it worked, I noticed that this is a deprecated method and the only recommended route is the full Hass.io install as an OS.

  • In this respect, is Hass.io a fully functioning and customizable OS like Raspbian?
  • Can I run docker containers (OpenVPN, Pihole, Transmission, etc) as usual?
  • If yes, what are some downsides of Hass.io vs Raspbian or OMV?
2

No. The options are rather limited.

Possibly via the portainer add on. Many are available as addons.

HassOS is designed to run HA, the supervisor and addons only. There is no GUI. The command line options are rather limited.

3

No because hass.io is not an operating system.

It’s a combination of docker containers, with one of them containing Home Assistant Core, all hosted on a minimal operating system called HassOS. The entire combination of HassOS and containers was collectively called hass.io. I used “was” because now it’s simply called Home Assistant.

So your question is actually can you customize HassOS and the answer is still no. HassOS is purpose-built for one task and that’s to host the aforementioned docker containers.

The only thing you can add are Add-Ons. These are actually docker containers that have been customized to work seamlessly with Home Assistant Core. They include a selection of common services like mosquitto, Node-Red, Grafana, MariaDB, etc.

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5

I overlooked that route. Thanks for pointing that out.

It’s a bit of an end-run around the way this ‘closed’ system was meant to be used, nevertheless it exists and can be used to add more services (via containers)

I guess one caveat is that if the goal is to add many more services (even beyond what is ‘blessed’ as an Add-On) then the choice of machine becomes a consideration.

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