I run most of my local services with yunohost, which demands that you use .local domains for apps like nextcloud or grafana. yunohost uses mdns, but mdns sucks^1 and so I have gotten very used to just editing /etc/hosts to force devices to associate .local domains with particular ips. But I cant figure out how to do this with homeassistant, which I have up to date and running on a laptop, and on a network that has no connection to the broader internet.^2
Because I have no internet at home I need a simple way that is easy to persist and debug to force homeassistant and all its components (IE, not just limited to particular applicateions / plugins) to resolve xyz.local domain to 192.168.1.666 or whatevr. I have tried editing /etc/hosts in the command line of the laptop that HA runs on, and that works for sending pings to xyz.local via the command line but I understand from reddit / github that those lines will be deleted on reboot, and either way it does not seem to work for anything other then direct pings, when I added nextcloud.local to /etc/hosts the caldav plugin could not connect to it and the nodered addon cant run any automations on my grafana instence or anything with a .local domain either.
I was hesitant to use it since it seems like overkill for something I am used to being very simple (editing the hosts file), and installing plugins is a huge pain in general, but I tried installing dnsmasq plugin and adding nextcloud.local, but that did not work either, even after a reboot. no caldav plugin, nodered cant connect to grafana.
I just want to edit the /etc/hosts file and have it work like it does on every other debian machine I have running on my local network. Is there an equivilant way to do that home assistant?
- I dont know if its yunohosts implimentation or if general support for it sucks, but I suspect general support because a lot of devices have a hard time connecting to homeassistant as well, which I dont use with yunohost, which to me suggests that mdns as a protocal is not nearly as robust as just editing /etc/hosts
- If I want to install a plugin I have to take the HA laptop to work, install the plugin there, then bring it home.