Running in Docker vs supervised

Hey folks,

I have just come back to home assistant after playing with it on a PI a few years ago. I want to try running it on better hardware as the last time i kept getting sd card failures with the pi.

On the hardware I have, I am tempted to run docker and have containers with home assistant as well as my unifi controller, pihole & UPS management software.

I span up the home assistant docker image from docker hub and it works well but I will have to add other things manually such as an MQTT broker etc.

I know that supervised uses docker as well so thought that might be an easy option if I can manually add other docker containers without messing up the HA environment

So, any advice on either sticking with managing docker myself or can I used supervised and also add other docker containers manually for unifi etc on the same host?

Cheers

J

Supervised is only officially supported on a current vanille Debian installation with no additional applications or containers. Supervised is a collection of containers that basically give you the addons capability of HaOS. I personally prefer the Container method and using the official zwavejs2mqtt container, for instance.

Of course with Supervised you are responsible for maintaining the OS & dependencies but once you install other containers, your support for HA is much more limited. The developers do not have the time to support a variety of configurations. Supporting plain vanilla Debian was a compromise to free up developer time.

ADR-14 documents Home Assistant supervised.

Once you figure out Docker then adding things manually instead of the Supervisor is fairly straight-forward.

And as noted above you won’t ever have to worry about your install being unsupported. Or even worse, “unhealthy” and then you can’t even do any updates of HA itself until you fix it.

My recommendation is to always go with HA Container unless you just can’t figure out Docker for some reason.

2 Likes

If you can’t figure out Docker then Supervised is likely a bad choice too. That just leaves HaOS as the best installation.

1 Like

Very true.

1 Like

I intend to switch from Supervised to Container. As a result, I need a solution to replace the Text Editor Addon. Would you please advise me if or which text editor you use?

I use Notepad++

I’m a big fan of supervised as I run some HA container addons I haven’t been able to find suitable generic replacements for yet. Supervised with addons is just easier. If the install goes ‘unhealthy’ you can set a flag in supervisor to ignore it and updates etc work fine with no issues. You do need to keep on top of any messages in supervisor highlighting any new issues though. It’s still less effort than running container any way less than core.

Thank you both very much for answering so quickly.
Unfortunately, I have constant problems with Supervisor, and I also don’t like the fact that it takes decisions away from me.

I have spent time over the last week setting up HA Container to learn more about Docker. I started with HAOS on a Pi several years ago, moved to Supervised on Ubuntu but then went back to HAOS (in a VM on Proxmox) when the Debian requirement happened. So far I am really happy with the container setup (running in another VM). I set up Syncthing to edit my config files, so I can edit them on my PC using Visual Studio Code, and they just sync to HA. Works really well.

Ah, yes, there’s a good tutorial on Bearded Tinker’s Youtube channel for VSC. I also found
https://hub.docker.com/r/causticlab/hass-configurator-docker/. Puh, quite a lot of choice.