Work in progress: configuration for running a Home Assistant in containers with systemd and podman on Fedora IoT

Same IP address, port 8091.

Ok, opened the port, am connected. trying to add some devices… It shows me:

This probably doesn’t seem optimal. What next?

Never mind, I figured out from here: Z-wave js network key

Hmm… it doesn’t seem to be doing MQTT discovery in the same way for zwave… I’ve paired the devices… but don’t see them in HA.

Ooh, I was going to say “this is getting into general setup questions”, but actually there is something key which is important to my setup! It’s actually the recommended approach (from others on this forum), but is a little surprising — despite the name “zwavejs2mqtt”, the setup doesn’t actually use MQTT for Zwave

Instead, it uses a dedicated websockets connection on port 3000. (See -p 3000:3000 in the config — and note that it doesn’t require the mosquitto container or enable connections to the container localhost network with --network=slirp4netns:allow_host_loopback=true as the zigbee container config does.)

So, whatcha want to do here is: in the Settings GUI for zwave, find “Home Assistant”, and make sure WS Server is On, and set to port 3000. Optionally, you can disable MQTT Gateway — because we don’t have the network set up for it, that’s not working anyway, and despite what it says about “use only as control panel”, the Home Assistant websockets server takes care of that.

Once you have done that, go back to Home Assistant and enable the Z-Wave JS integration. That should make everything work.

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Great will give it a try tomorrow. Yeah once everything is being seen in home assistant then I’m good with the rest of setup. I just don’t really have any understanding of how the containers fit together.

Is it possible to use MQTT on the zwave stuff? I kinda like the idea of having one interface for all the devices

Does the app work for you? When I run it I get a 400 Bad Request error. Similar to:

This seems to be because I have a proxy on my network and even though I list “lan” in the proxy exceptions domains somehow the app is using the proxy anyway.

adding this to my configuration.yaml fixed this issue:

http:
  use_x_forwarded_for: true
  trusted_proxies:
    - 10.x.x.x
    - 10.x.x.x
    - fdxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::x
    - fdxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::x

It should be, but I haven’t tried it yet. In theory, what you would do is add

                              --network=slirp4netns:allow_host_loopback=true \

to the config (so it can access the MQTT broker on the localhost), and remove

                              -p 3000:3000 \

and turn off the “Home Assistant: WS Server” option. I think you’d configure zwave2mqtt with tls://localhost for the MQTT server, but I haven’t tested that — see https://zwave-js.github.io/zwavejs2mqtt/#/usage/setup?id=mqtt.

Oh! Yes, I did this too and forgot about it. Thanks for the note — I’ll add it to the instructions tomorrow.

I think

http:
  use_x_forwarded_for: true
  trusted_proxies:
    - 10.0.2.2


should be sufficient, but I'll need to test to be sure.

The device my proxy is on has multiple IP addresses so I included all of them that’s why I have 4 entries.

If you’re using the ngnix config from above, what’s happening is:

  • for rootless containers, podman uses slirp4netns to set up a VPN-like network
  • Within that network, 10.0.2.2 is the “virtual router” — it’s an oversimplification, but for most practical purposes you can treat this like the 127.0.0.1 local-loopback address on a regular machine.
  • Correspondingly, you can see that the nginx.conf redirects incoming requests (via proxy_pass) to http://10.0.2.2:8123 — that’s the port that Home Assistant is running on
  • you can, in the above setup without a firewall, connect from an external system to either the ngnix proxy or to Home Assistant diectly — the former on https://hostname:8443 and the latter on http://hostname:8123. This is useful for debugging, but the idea is to a) forward 443 to 8443 with the firewall, and b) block all external connections to ports in the 8000 range. That way, nginx is the only way in from the outside
  • The packges coming to Home Assistant from outside are given their “real” source address’. But the ones that come from the Ngnix proxy appear to come from the container router interface — that 10.0.2.2 “loopback”.
  • That can cause confusion, which is why:
  trusted_proxies:
    - 10.0.2.2

which is why the others should matter.

Note that if you have 10.0.2.x as a possible address range outside of your container setup (like, if you have 10.0.0.0/8 as your local network!), you’ll want change the podman network config to use something else. (And I’m not sure offhand how to do that.)

Nah, I don’t have the Nginx part at all. I just have a squid proxy on my home network to enforce various policies for my kids. Home-assistant is not available externally, I use a wireguard VPN to access the HA instance externally if needed (almost never needed).

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Minor update: edited the config for the certbot container so the secret certbot-creds are mounted in with permission 0400. (Read by root only.) Somewhere in April the certbot container started checking for that and bailing out.

Wondering what is the deal with Digital Ocean? Why do you require it?

It doesn’t need to be Digital Ocean, but it does need to be a DNS provider which offers an API. And, it turns out that this is a service Digital Ocean offers for free. I’ll edit the main text to clarify.

And the DNS approach has several advantages:

  1. You don’t need to punch an incoming hole through your home firewall for Let’s Encrypt to work.
  2. Simplifies the ngnix config since you don’t have to deal with putting the challenge responses there.
  3. You can get a wildcard cert, covering *.home.example.org.

Is there any actual cumulative description of this whole setup or just this discussion?

The first post is meant to be that! What would make that more clear? What’s missing?

I had to use

http:
  use_x_forwarded_for: true
  trusted_proxies:
    - 127.0.0.1

for this to work.

I have the nginx reverse proxy setup the same as you, and it uses 10.0.2.2 there. Did you confirm that using 10.0.2.2 in the trusted_proxies works on your setup?

I rebooted my machine and realized that homeassistant doesn’t start automatically, I have to log in as the “homeassistant” user and start it with systemctl --user start container-homeassistant.

What’s the right way to make this happen automatically at boot time?

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Oh, good point. Use enable instead of start. I’ll add a section on this.

Yes, it should be the container network not localhost — although if you are using net=host localhost will work too.

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