It’s acting as user ‘homeassistant’ with sudo, I get that then it sets up a python3 virtual environment? Not sure quite what that’s in aid of and the ‘source bin/activate’ line is a total mystery to me.
I have a suspicion this might be why it might have forgotten my username/password (other than the obvious: I made a typo)
so now I’m trying to get a list of Homeassistant users, so I can confirm I’m typing in the right user name at least but I cannot see how to do this. Some threads mention a ‘config’ folder and a ‘.storage’ file or folder within that which might contain some relevant info but I cannot find any of those.
Finally, when I did last login, I couldn’t find the option to install add-ons. Is this limited to HAOS or something?
Most people run HASSOS on a raspberry PI as it’s the easiest most self contained way to run and manage HASS.
The second approach is to run HASS as a docker container, this is a more advanced approach and requires more technical skill, as you’ll need to download and run other containers for MariaDB, zwave, zigbee, MQTT, etc…
Is there a reason you are not using one of the standard approaches?
Yes, lots of reasons. I was considering it anyway because the docker approach failed me - horribly inefficient, don’t you think? all those mini installations taking ages to install and bootup, taking up extra space pointlessly, so hard to configure, all walled off so you can’t fix anything… ugh. I tried to get GPIO pins to work, and nothing would help, couldn’t even run a python script to test whether the attached device was functioning. All I got from the forums was ‘nah, sorry, it can’t do that, we dropped support, etc, etc’ which wasn’t good enough.
The real clincher was when running HAOS, I updated and the whole thing stopped working - all I had access to was an emergency shell (not the HA shell) and it told me absolutely nothing about what might have gone wrong. Obviously I can’t trust my home automation to software that I can’t control.
If things are going to try and make themselves easy to use by stopping people from actually being able to diagnose problems, then I expect them to be flawless and my experience of it was anything but.
So, I’ve decided to go with something I can control more easily - HA running on a machine I have actual access to and those are my reasons for not using HAOS.
" Start Home Assistant Core for the first time. This will complete the installation for you, automatically creating the .homeassistant configuration directory in the /home/homeassistant directory, and installing any basic dependencies."
That is the configuration directory with that there is a .storage directory. In their person file that has a list of people. The passwords are stored in a file in that directory but they not readable. To reset the password follow this
I find docker to be very efficient, scalable and easy to manage. Very easy to rollback if an upgrade fails. That said there’s a bunch to learn to use docker well.
Thank you, I’ve found the .storage file and resolved the issue - I’d miss-typed the user name.
I may well be venting my frustrations with docker due to unfamiliarity - I’m aware of it and have used dockers but prefer to have one copy of python, gcc etc and configuration files that I can edit that stay edited. I’m sure it’ll all possible with sufficient editing of yaml files and restarting processes but I find that whole loop fiddly and time consuming.