I have just setup Mosquito and Zigbee2MQTT on a Raspberry Pi 5 (bare metal installation). Home Assistant runs on a NUC (also bare metal). The controller is a Smlight SLZB-06 connected to the network via ethernet and located in the central part of the house. I added one Sonoff smart plug and enabled it by putting the Zigbee network in joining mode using the Z2M frontend UI through a browser (pointing to the IP address of the RPi at port 8080). All good so far.
My devices up to now have been Z-wave, so I have never installed ZHA or Z2M on the HA device. I installed the MQTT integration, and HA successfully sees the Smlight controller and the Sonoff plug. I also added the SLZB-06 integration, which exposes a bunch of entities for the controller (not sure how useful that will be, but it works).
My question is how to get the Z2M frontend UI to be accessible from the HA sidebar so that I don’t have to open it in a browser every time I want to add a new Zigbee device or look at the status of a device in that interface. If you install the Z2M addon, it has an option to add the frontend to the HA sidebar, and I’m guessing HA just frames that UI because it looks the same. But if I install the Z2M addon, won’t I be creating a second instance of Z2M, and wouldn’t that create a second Zigbee network (which I do not want)?
Is that the purpose of the Z2M “proxy” addon that is one of the three Z2M addons available in HA? Or is it the Mosquito broker that actually creates the Zigbee network and it’s as simple as installing the regular Z2M addon in HA because each Z2M instance would point to the same Mosquito broker?
Or am I over-thinking this and I don’t need Z2M in HA at all because there is some way to add devices to the network through HA without having to use the Z2M frontend?
I’m a little out of my league here, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!