What are Addons?

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Hello,
at the moment I am relatively new to Home Assistant and I have seen that Home Assistant supports Addons, for example “Adguard”, “RasperryMatic” or “Grafana”.
But I am wondering what the Addons are in more detail. Are the Addons some kind of Virtual Machines running on top of Home Assistant or some kind of Docker containers? How are the Addons done in Home Assistant?

Thanks for clarification,

Thomas

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Thanks a lot for the link, which exactly states “Under the hood, add-ons are container images published to a container registry like GitHub container registry and Docker Hub.”

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While add-ons are Docker containers, they have special needs. You can’t just run any container on a Home Assistant OS install. The add-on container has to be set up to be managed by the supervisor container.

You can run any Docker container you want (except add-ons) on a Home Assistant Container installation.

Usually if a plain vanilla Docker container exists then someone has made an add-on version.

Also generally speaking add-ons host software applications. For simply interfacing a device to Home Assistant you would use an integration instead. Or sometimes both. e.g.

The NUT add-on runs the Network UPS Tools application and connects to a UPS. The NUT integration interfaces between the add-on and Home Assistant to provide sensors and controls.

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