I have a working installation of Home Assistant on Hassio, and see the limits of not having the option to use apt-get install or pip3 install.
Running on a RPI 3+
Can I do a fresh install of Hassbian (or your recommended distro) and then put back my snapshot, and everything is configured the same?
Hasbian doesn’t have the Hassio menu, so no addons and no snapshot menu.
Having said that, snapshots are just compressed archives so if you can extract the contents to the correct directories you should be good.
I run my snapshots through a nightly automation, but loosing the Hass.io menu also removes the Add-on store.
The important feedback is weather the restore from snapshot (Hassio) will get everything back in Hassbian. I’m fine using a tar/zip extraction tool to put the config back. Can someone verify that all config is stored in the /config dir?
I am considering this flow:
Yes. It’s all in /config. But the directory structure will be different so you just have to find the correct location to extract to.
What do you need to install? Is it something that already has a docker image for?
You can install Hassio on Raspbian Lite. I have posted the directions here a couple of times. If you are interested, I can pull that information together later.
As you have discovered, HAssOs is designed to only be a lightweight hypervisor for Docker & Hassio.
Hassbian is another option, but you lose Hassio addons, most of which can be installed on Hassbian.
I am currently running HA in a venv, similar to Hassbian because, in my personal opinion, even though there is a full-time Hassio developer, Hassio adds another level of breakage that, many times, is undocumented.
There should be no reason to replace hassio if you just want to install other software - just do it in another Docker container. If you also install Portainer you will be able to more easily manage the containers remotely.
I don’t quite understand. I have Hassio running on a Nuc (Ubuntu OS) - and can install whatever I want on it. You can’t do that on a Pi?
Yes you can. The instructions are not all in one place though. If you are interested I can post them here.
I have run Hassio on Raspian Lite. The Hassio installer assumes the cou architecture sona command line switch is needed. Otherwise follow the Linux installation instructions.
If you used the Hassio image it is installed in docker.
Your Nuc installation is based on an other Linux distro than the hass.io. The latter is a compact distro without apt-get install or pip3 install
OK. So there might be a Docker deep down there, but it has not come to my attention 
, until now…?
I used his install package: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and B+ 32bit (recommended)
My main goal would be to be able to run apt-get install or pip3 install
Hassio runs on Docker. Period.
No. HassOS is the distro. Hassio is a set of docker containers
For what purpose though? What do you need those commands for? What applications? In a docker environment, you use Docker images, you don’t install things directly.
Creating your own local build hassio addon is actually not that difficult. There aretutorials on the HA homepage.
e.g. I created one recently in a few hours to run ink to get printer ink levels and send via mqtt.
Basically you start with a blank install of alpine linux (because its so small) and the dockerfile for the addon defines what will be deployed (aka your apt-get and pip3 install).
Of course as others have suggested you can also start with the docker image of an existing application.
I see there are lots of details I did not know. Apologies.
One issue that stops me (as far as I know ) is related to Apple TV, where it looks like I have to do an install
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev
to get it all to work
If its an official component (which AFAIK aTV is) then all the python requirements should already be in hassio.
As an example I need to use ffmpeg for one of my ip cameras and ffmpeg is already in the hassio homeassistant docker image.
I don´t get it, then…
Why do the Apple TV component state:
“To use this component, you must first install some system libraries and a compiler. For Debian or a similar system, this should be enough:”
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev
And frankly I don´t get the AppleTV entities to work as expected, though they show up in the entities list.
This is documentation related to a python venv install.
If they are showing up as the AppleTV devices, then it’s already working…you don’t need to install anything.
Thank you. I have to go through my script, then.
E.g. I would like to have his condition in an automation to run
- condition: template
value_template: '{{ states.media_player.apple_tv_1etg.attributes.app_name == "Netflix" }}'
It does not return or show the app name in the entity list for that AppleTV