Also: its own container OS!

Posted May 9, 2025 23:39 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions

One _really_ nice feature of HomeAssistant is its own image-based OS (HAOS).

I was initially skeptical about it, and started hosting HA on my own server. But then I had a nightmare upgrade, after a year of not paying attention to it. I needed to manually update dependencies, unbreak my whole OS after accidentally running `chmod` in a wrong directory, etc.

I decided that my time was more valuable, so I got an Intel NUC, set up HAOS on it, and... that was it! It updates perfectly on its own, I can install addons by clicking on them in the "HomeAssistant Store", and I can also firewall the whole home automation in its own VLAN.

It also can back up itself onto my NAS. And it can restore itself! This was super-handy when the SSD in my NUC died last month. I just popped in a new SSD, installed the basic OS, and did a restore.

This is about the most perfect example of a hassle-free "homebrew" IoT experience.

Also: its own container OS!

Posted May 10, 2025 0:41 UTC (Sat) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

HA is a proper job!

Your comment is a classic HA experience. You want to take it seriously but didn't have the time at the time and something went wrong. It is engineered properly and hence you fixed your snag and moved on.

I don't think I've ever seen you describe a product in such glowing terms!

Also: its own container OS!

Posted May 19, 2025 12:45 UTC (Mon) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes. Always use the HAOS, unless you have at least 5 years of HA usage experience and at least a year of HA *development* experience. And even then, for the peace of mind it is best to run your production instance on HAOS (possibly inside a Proxmox VM) and have a separate development instance for hacking and weird experiments. The integration with addons, HACS, backups and upgrades and tight tracking of compatible system level package (hi Bluetooth stack!) is *critical* for reliable and stable experience.

Also: its own container OS!

Posted May 19, 2025 17:44 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

I actually found out that HA development is fine with HAOS. You can just install an SSH plugin and develop a new component in the `custom_components` directory. It's a bit clunky with HAOS restarts, but for simple components it's fine.

The same applies to ESPHome-based components, they can be developed in `esphome` folder directly.

Also: its own container OS!

Posted Aug 9, 2025 21:33 UTC (Sat) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

Recommend installing HA using the development scripts into a ./venv and developing that way (venv/bin/hass -c path/to/config.yaml). Restarting HA in HAOS every time is too annoying and it consumes a whole machine (or, worse, your prod setup). Restarting the venv HA is much, much faster.