Okay, let me start by saying that I really do love Home Assistant. I believe that it is a fantastic piece of software, with very dedicated developers that are far more talented than I. Although, that being said, I strongly disagree with a number of their design choices.
My most recent problem has been trying to put Home Assistant behind a reverse proxy with a subpath. The Home Assistant developers flat out refuse any contribution that adds support for this. Supposedly, the frontend has hard-coded paths for some views, to me this doesn’t sound like a good practice to begin with – that being said, I mostly program in Go these days (so I’m unsure if this is something that is pretty common in some frameworks or languages). The official solution is to use a subdomain, which I can’t do – I’m trying to route all services through a Tailscale Funnel (which only provides a single domain; I doubt that Tailscale Funnels where ever designed for this purpose, but I’m trying to completely remove Cloudflare Tunnels for my selfhosted services).
The other major problem I’ve ran into, is that HAOS assumes that you would have no need to run any other Docker services other than those that are add-ons or Home Assistant itself. Which, I’m sorry (not really), Home Assistant add-ons are an absolute pain to deal with! Sure, when they work, they’re supper simple, but having to write an add-on for whenever I just want to spin up a single Docker container is not going to work for me.
Now, some smaller issues I’ve had:
- There’s no way to change the default authentication providers. I host for my (non-techie) family, they’re not going to know what the difference between local authentication and command-line authentication is, just that one works and the other doesn’t.
- Everything that is “advanced” requires a workaround. Like mounting external hard drives and sharing it with containers in HAOS requires you to setup the Samba add-on, add the network drive, and then you can use it within containers.
Again, I still really love Home Assistant, it’s just getting to a point where things are starting to feel hacky or not thought out all the way. I’ve considered other self-hosted automation software, but there really isn’t any other good alternative (unless you want to be using HomeKit). Also, I’m a programmer first, and far away from being a self-hosting pro (so let me know if I’ve missed any crucial details that completely flip my perspective on it’s head).
If you got to the end of this thanks for reading my rant, you’re awesome.
Have you considered not using the Home Assistant OS? You don’t need to run it to use Home Assistant. You can instead set your host up with some other OS, like Debian, and then run Home Assistant in a docker container (or containers, plural) and run any other containers you want.
I’m not doing this myself so can’t speak to its limitations, but from what I’ve heard, if you’re familiar with Docker then it’s pretty straightforward.
A lot of apps use hard coded paths, so using a subdomain per app makes it much easier to use them all. Traefik has middleware, including stripPrefix, which allow you to strip a path prefix before forwarding the path to the app, though - have you tried that approach?
Strip prefix won’t work if the frontend expects to find paths at absolute locations. You would need to patch the html, css and js on the fly, which is somewhere between ugly and (almost) impossible.
I would also suggest to simply use custom (sub) domains. Especially in your intranet you can have whatever domains you want.
This is what I’ve seen would be the only “feasible” way of getting HA to work behind a subpath, in my opinion this only works for very small application though (not something as complex as Home Assistant).
I’m (currently) on Raspberry Pi OS (as I need something that “just works”). Home Assistant is running in Docker like everything else.
I should’ve mentioned this, but I’m using Nginx (I really enjoy the simplicity of just having to add a section to a file whenever I want to add something). Before running HAOS I was running RPIOS again and used Traefik, it worked (but felt like a lot more work to setup than just a plain Nginx setup).
Edit: I forgot to mention, but there are things like
stripPrefixfor Nginx, I’m going to look into them. Although, this is what I meant, when you start to do things that are “advanced” with Home Assistant they turn into “hacks,” and the barrier for advanced things feels a lot lower than with other self-hosted services (and I get that Home Assistant is very complex under the hood, it’s just frustrating).This was going to be my suggestion. Just run home assistant as a Docker container, problem solved!
Still no subpaths, changing default authentication providers, and there can still be workarounds that feel hackish (I’ve used HA is a container before) the difference is that you’ll do less in Home Assistant, so you avoid them as much as possible.
You can’t use add-ons when running HA as a docker container, which basically lobotomizes it.
Yes you can. It requires those docker containers to be installed and plugged into it on a stand alone system. This is exactly what HAOS is doing behind the scenes for is users and why many stick with it.
Addons are just other containers, you can run them next to ha
You don’t get the direct integration then though, as far as I’m aware there’s no way to manually setup an addon
What direct integration? You get a button on the UI, vs you do everything the way you want.
HAOS is intended for people who want everything to just work, without much fiddling. If you need something more, you need a docker based install. You can do everything there and even more, but you have to set it up manually.
AHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHA
But seriously. I want to recommend haos to friends and family but when they ask, I always tell them it’s complicated.
I know them. I’m their personal help desk. As a software engineer, it’s easy for me but no way could they do a fraction of what I’ve done easily.
To an average user, yaml itself may as well be C++.
Yeah, that’s why I finally ditched it, (I said this in another reply) but it was intended to be something the family could figure out if I wasn’t available or something did happen to me. There’s no way they could figure all of that out, doubly so with everything that felt “hackish” just to get Home Assistant and Jellyfin running.
I’d rather them have a usable experience now, that I setup with the least amount of hacks and cloud services. I know it’s kinda weird and an unhappy reason, but it also (hopefully) will make my life easier.
Yep. I’m interested to see where homie goes.
There’s also Gladys assistant which looks like a HA fork.
I’ve tried to set up a business installing HA but I need someone smarter than me to provide support who is interested in profit-sharing.
It’s relative, I guess.
Add ons are just shitty packaging of other software. Just run the other software directly.
What kind of addons? I have HACS and it works fine.
No backup solutions besides manual backing up and then setting up baremetal backing up
no configuration editor
HACS works, but no custom addons
manual configuration of esphome/nodered/mosquitto (I prefer this though)
I prefer docker because it is comfortable for me and I run all my services on one server, but it is indeed a bit less easy.
When I host multiple services, I need to back them up as well. I simply mount all data volumes of all containers into a unified location that gets backed up by kopia every hour.
Since the volume is directly on disk, I also didn’t have any problems editing configuration files.
The things I see listed as addons on the website are dedicated services anyway, that have images of their own you can easily spin up as containers.
I think if someone is advanced enough to want to run HASS on their own together with other stuff, they prefer to have more control anyway.
For sure, but the point is that it isn’t integrated into homeassistant.
For many people, they want to do everything from homeassistant. You can always have kludged together solutions. I edit my configs with VIM and backup to my central backup location via an automation. However, this is doing things outside of homeassistant that many people find inconvenient.
My point however was that people who want that kind of convenience (or rather who don’t want to fiddle around manually), why would they want to run HASS in a container in the first place? Either you are tinkerer, then it doesn’t matter or you are not, in which case you probably don’t arrive at the point of running HASS on anything other than a preinstalled distro in the first place.
Home Assistant OS add-ons are usually just repackaged and pre-configured Docker containers. The only thing the add-ons system really gives you is convenience
There’s alternative installation methods.
Yes and no. If you want a really simple setup HAOS add-ons are amazing, but as soon as you want to run something someone else hasn’t created a container for you’re stuck doing extra work than just writing a
Dockerfileordocker-compose. Plus, you can’t setup networks between them and (as mentioned in the original post) sharing drives can be hackish as well.The (grim) reason had I tried HAOS was because of the promise of something really simple that my family could figure out if something ever happened to me.