I have used Core on Ubuntu as well as supervised on Ubuntu. I have also used HassOS on ESXI. Nowadays I use HA Core on Unraid (which is a docker container).
Would you miss anything? I believe not, actually I have much more flexibility overall with this approach. However like people already mentioned, you will have to do a lot of stuff manually. With Unraid it is easy to update docker containers without portainer but this isnt the case for every OS.
Personally I will advise the following:
If you want to focus on building your server around Home Assistant, want easy to install addons and preconfigured stuff for pretty much every addon you will use (note that there are a limited number of addons). Get Home Assistant.
If you want more control and flexibility I will suggest that you try Home Assistant Core. This will require you to install the addons yourself in one way or another, you will not have the supervisor tab and there will be no update HA button. They will not show up in the sidebar either (unless you create your own links, named panel iframe).
Conclusion: No you wont miss out on anything when running Core. However if you want a more hassle free install get HA (hass.io).
I always just use docker-compose for this and make sure I use whatever tag I am interested in. I know I use only about 5% od Portainer s abilities. I didnāt even know until recently how to deploy a new container with options in Portainer lol. Anywayā¦ whatever works I guess.
Yeah see all those settings for non ha-containers are in my docker-compose file. Why are you doing this with Home Assistant Supervised @nickrout - is this why you had issues with supervisor recently?
Maybe Iām just old-school, but running the system in a virtualenv seems by far the least complex way to go, provided (and itās a big proviso) that one is already fully comfortable with Linux administration. No need to learn docker, containers, supervisor, anything like that ā and Iām free to run other things on the Pi both to support HA (appdaemon, scripts of my own that do things like pull printer ink levels whilst compensating for my printerās broken SNMP implementation) and independent of it (Plex, a simple NAS system, security camera storage).
I installed HA Core yesterday and I did not realise I would not have access to the add-on store. Now Iām happy the way it is, but Iād like to find an easy way to add mosquitto and node-red.
May I suggest? There should be a repo or at least a page with the most usual add-ons and the way to install them manually.
Thatās exactly how I installed mosquitto years ago running in a venv on my RaspberryPi and then I installed it again the same way when I switched to a venv on a NUC.
Iām a few weeks in on home assistant container and am now all in. Not sure Iāll Every go back. This approach is so much more flexible. I was worried Iād miss snapshots the most, but the lack of a snapshot service forced me to figure out how to get rclone up and running. I use node-RED to schedule regular tarball backups to Google drive, and Iām using docker for just about every service besides rclone and cups, so recovering from a shit storm should be pretty painless.
Iām managing two pi4ās now all from portainer, and find that interface is so great for keeping it all going. Watchtower emails me with updates, do Iāve been able to replicate that feature too.
Works fine from outside the virtual environment, thanks!
But how can I check that it works from inside HA Core?
As I understand the logic inside HA, there should be services available such as https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/mqtt/service/
For the moment, I donāt have any MQTT service available.
I ran it for a while. I loved the interface but I kept having issues with the databases becoming corrupt. I couldnāt get a backup to run more than a few days before more issues. I eventually looked elsewhere and thatās when I found rclone. Works great for my needs