I think installing official addons alongside with HA docker installation could be a lot easier just by providing docker compose examples in documentation and project pages on github.
I have voice-related integrations (and docker containers) installed like piper, whisper, etc and sometimes it takes to much time to figure out what the proper docker compose file would look like.
TL;DR: we need Docker Compose examples for official HA addons that you can install alongside with HA docker installation
While I agree having compose example configs could be very helpful, it also carries with it a necessity of support and maintenance that might be too much.
People would need to maintain those examples to stay relevant and functional to the current version. In some cases, docker images are maintained by 3rd parties (for example, I believe piper doesn’t have it’s own container image) which can add further complexity with versions. If people don’t maintain the compose examples, that’s just additional support on the HA community when things don’t work.
Addons are external docker containers optimized to be maintained by the Supervisor.
integrations are either built in to HA core or added to HA core so they reside internally to HA itself.
Addons are external apps that provide additional services. They don’t even technically need to be used by HA. Once they exist then basically anything can use them.
Take for example the MQTT addon. yes it’s used by HA for the MQTT integration but any app that needs to use MQTT can use the broker provided by the addon.
but there is also a Mosquitto docker image (different than the addon) that can be frun to basically do the same thing. the addon is based on the source image.
But also not all addons have a source image. Some addons are created solely as an addon and no docker image exists for it.
An integration provides a way for HA to interact with things either internally like automations or with external services like the aforementioned MQTT broker created by the Mosquitto addon.
there could be both addons and integrations that work hand in hand. Like the zwavejs addon and zwavejs integration or the mosquitto addon and the mqtt integration. But addons and integrations are 100% different things.
no.
HAOS provides addons that are based on the source docker images but they are modified to allow for control by the HA Supervisor.
you can’t run addons in Docker directly.
You need to run the source image to create the equivalent docker container.
That’s why docker images are outside the control of HA.
I think the idea here is to be able to run the equivalent of an addon (which are docker containers) alongside the HA container.
Basically, doing the equivalent of the supervisor manually.
While for most “global” piece of software, the addon is just a thin wrapper above an existing dockerfile, so docker compose examples are handily avaialble, the HA specific addons, e.g. wyoming stuff, sometimes (often?) lack documentation on how to use them as standalone containers.