Unifi Controller questions

Third party integrations
#1

Hello,
I have some questions regarding Ubiquiti Unifi.
I still have 2 AP’s laying around from my previous house and I want to install them again in my new house, but first I want to be prepared and have some questions.
Currently I am running HA in Proxmox.

I want to use the Unifi controller and integrate it with Home Assistant. What is the best way to do it?
I could already find these: UniFi Network - Home Assistant and Home Assistant Community Add-on: UniFi Controller. And it tells that it is using the same port as MQTT (which I have running) and “It is recommended that you run the UniFi Network application in a dedicated virtual machine to avoid that situation.” So is the best way to go to create a new VM in Proxmox for Unifi Controller?
Is there any good explanation on how to do this? And what is the best way to get this (external) data into Home Assistant?
Thanks in advance!

#2
  • you need to run unifi controller add-on if you have supervised installation, if not, you need to run yourself related docker instance manually. You can adjust all open ports and related numbers, do not worry. Or you can even download the software and run in your machine, if it is supported out of the box but i would not go for this, as it will be part of system installation not isolated in a docker
  • after that, it is time to install unifi integration inside home assistant which will communicate with previous docker.
#3

Thanks! I have supervised installation.
Does it matter for the Unifi Controller that it’s not available when restarting HA?
And I read some replies in the add-on post that it stopped working when changing the port number. This isn’t still the case? I actually don’t want to change anything on MQTT.

#4

I´m using the add-on for the controller on HA supervised on an RPI and I have no issues whatsoever. I had issues with an RPI3 where I also had EspHome and that caused memory overrun when compiling in ESPhome as the controller does take quite some memory, but on an RPI4 I have not had any issue (nor on RPI3 without compiling).

#5

Change your ports before starting it up for the first time, it will work. If you change the ports later on and it fails to start, you were supposed to uninstall and install back again (worked for me), not sure if this is still the case.

#6

But be aware that you only change the port for the external docker container. You need to leave the internal port the same.

I’m not sure how that works with a supervised add-on since I don’t use it but with docker it is a part of the docker configuration of the container.

#7

yes, you are only allowed to change external ports, internals are read-only inside supervisor.

#8

If you can install unifi controller in VM, yes. This is best and safest way to install controller.

After that, you can use the Unifi integration. This is configurable in UI.