Could someone explain the difference between restarting the Server, the Core, the Supervisor and the Host?
I am not an expert on Home Assistant architecture so this is a pretty basic summary of my understanding and probably contains errors.
In an OS / Supervised installation, all the addons, the supervisor and Home Assistant run in their own Docker containers that can be restarted independently.
Restarting the host, the only one that should be called “rebooting”, shuts the hardware down and restarts it. So everything running is restarted. This should be viewed as a drastic move, and should rarely be required.
Restarting Home Assistant (also known as “the core” or sometimes “the server”), only restarts the running home assistant container. This is responsible for all your automations, scenes, scripts, etc… doing what they do, as well as the web server that you connect to Lovelace through, UI editors, etc…
The Supervisor can be viewed as another program that looks after your addons and how Home Assistant connects to them (among many other things). It can be reloaded to force a check for updates, this is not as drastic as restarting the whole Supervisor container. Just like automations can be reloaded instead of restarting the whole Home Assistant container.
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Thank you!
This is helpful thank! I am super familiar with Linux but all these terms confused me too, and I have never known what to restart when.
Very helpful.
Thank you!