I’m trying to figure out if I should transition to Hass.io; wondering if I could get your advice and input.
I’m an advanced Linux user and am currently running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I have Home Assistant and various other services (Mosquitto, etc.) in a Dockerized environment that I update/manage through a private Git repository (i.e., I push changes – Home Assistant configuration changes, etc. – from my local machine, SSH into the Pi, pull the changes, re-build and re-launch my Docker containers, and I’m good to go). Everything’s working well, but I’m wondering if, compared to Hass.io, it’s “too home-brewed.”
Are there compelling reasons I should abandon my Dockerized, Git-centric latticework in favor of Hass.io? Will Hass.io give me something I don’t already have? Will Hass.io remove any flexibility that I currently have (and enjoy)?
Give it a test run first, may be issues unique to your setup. For example I’ve discovered that I cannot use raspberry Pi cameras with Hassio yet, which is a significant obstacle
Yeah… i’m still using HA the old fashion way. Keep on hearing about Hass.io. Wondering what is the fuss all about. I hold on to “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”, unless I’m missing out something great.
I messed with it some on a seperate Pi and like the idea. I think it will end up being the primary way people use HA down the road but right now it feels very Beta. If you are happy with your current setup why change? I’d wait a month or two and see where the issues lie, if any.
The snapshot feature is very cool though I tested it out and it worked well.
Related to my earlier comment, with Hassio you don’t have root privileges, see https://home-assistant.io/addons/ssh/ Since you sound like a power user this may be a problem for you.
Main advantage I’ve experienced of Hassio is the ease of adding add-ons or performing updates, which are done with a click. Also going forward I imagine many users will be on Hassio so debugging issues will be easier with this common ground.
Specifically since you already have a setup you are happy with, and are a power user, then I don’t see a big advantage to switching to Hassio. Indeed it may cause headaches such as I have experience with the pi camera
BTW my main HASS instance is on a Synology but want to use Hassio on pi for projects
I moved over to HassIO and am trying to stick with it as its the future of home assistant and I am pretty new to all this anyway so it makes sense to me. As an advanced user it may not be the same for you.
I used a separate SD card so I could try HassIO knowing that if I wanted to I could just switch the SD cards around and go back to my old Hassbian. Might be worth doing something like that and trying it out for yourself. That way switching back is easy.
Not unless there is something tangible that I am likely to get out of it. If you are ‘trying to stick with it’, does that mean you have found it worse than your original installation?
I’m by far the best person to base your decision on as I was using hassbian for 1 week before moving to hassio and have only been using that for a few days. If you have the time to try it out it can’t do any harm.
I got everything working that I had previously, but I didn’t have a lot as I am so new to it. I keep reading posts about people not being able to get things working that were working before hassio, which is far from ideal ofcourse. It certainly won’t make sense to change yet if it stops you from using a feature you have currently.
I like the way they have made installing updates and addons easier, but the addon has to have been created or you will have to do it yourself (or wait for someone else to do it). Maybe it is worth waiting until more becomes available for hassio.
HA has all of the components I need for the projects I have planned. And in future if it doesn’t have them il develop them
Goal is projects which just involve a pi zero and Hassio as this makes it much easier for others to reproduce
If you’re an advanced user with Linux skills and an existing working setup, there’s no need, especially if you want to tinker with your install. hass.io is more appliance-oriented for people who need a black-box sort of setup.
What I like about it, my Linux skills being copying verbatim what someone tells me to type, is I can add functions outside the core of Home Assistant to the same Pi without fear of buggering up my working HA and perhaps even more importantly uninstall them easily if i don’t like/want them anymore.
Still got the charms of yaml to deal with obviously, so not quite black box, but I’m fine with that and it still lets me feel I’ve achieved something when changing the config.
Previously I used other devices to run things like dasher and the Google Assistant sdk for the reasons above but no more. Only downside to me is that it relies on someone producing an add-on for the function I want to add but I’m confident virtually everything will be added over time.
I have to say, I was totally expecting it not to work, and I even compensated for this by commenting things out to anticipate this. I don’t think I needed to do this.
I used a separate SD card, so I could roll back without fuss. Also, I’m ok with losing my DB history for migration
In reality, it worked pretty much out of the box.
I backed up my hassbian configs for:
HA (everything in HA dir)
configuration.yaml
all other .yaml configs
zwcfg_*******.xml
samba config
smb.conf
mosquitto config
mosquitto.conf
pwfile (found in same dir as mosquitto.conf)
Then I installed hass.io on a new SD card, didnt bother with wifi (I’ll set that up another time)
Waited for installation to come online and checked IP (Pi has a static IP in my router)
).
