Raspberry Pi

Before installing Home Assistant, you might want to compare installation methods. Most notably, add-ons are only available with the Home Assistant Operating System.

Suggested Hardware

We will need a few things to get started with installing Home Assistant. Links below lead to Amazon US. If you’re not in the US, you should be able to find these items in web stores in your country.

• Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspberry Pi 3 is ok too, if you have one laying around). Raspberry Pi are currently hard to come by, use RPilocator to find official distributors with stock.
• Power Supply for Raspberry Pi 4 or Power Supply for Raspberry Pi 3
• Micro SD Card. Ideally get one that is Application Class 2 as they handle small I/O much more consistently than cards not optimized to host applications. A 32 GB or bigger card is recommended.
• SD Card reader. This is already part of most laptops, but you can purchase a standalone USB adapter if you don’t have one. The brand doesn’t matter, just pick the cheapest.
• Ethernet cable. Required for installation. After installation, Home Assistant can work with Wi-Fi, but an Ethernet connection is more reliable and highly recommended.

Install Home Assistant Operating System

This guide shows how to install the Home Assistant Operating system onto your Raspberry Pi using Raspberry Pi Imager.

If Raspberry Pi Imager is not supported by your platform, you can use Balena Etcher instead.

Write the image to your SD card

1. Download and install the Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer as described under https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/.
2. Open the Raspberry Pi Imager.
3. Choose the operating system:
   1. Select Choose OS.
   2. Select Other specific-purpose OS > Home assistants and home automation > Home Assistant.
   3. Choose the Home Assistant OS that matches your hardware (RPi 3 or RPi 4).
4. Choose the storage:
   1. Insert the SD card into the computer. Note: the contents of the card will be overwritten.
   2. Select your SD card.
5. Write the installer onto the SD card:
   1. To start the process, select Write.
   2. Wait for the Home Assistant OS to be written to the SD card.
6. Eject the SD card.

Start up your Raspberry Pi

1. Insert the SD card into your Raspberry Pi.

2. Plug in an Ethernet cable that is connected to the network.

3. Connect the power supply to start up the device.

4. In the browser of your desktop system, within a few minutes you will be able to reach your new Home Assistant at homeassistant.local:8123.

Congratulations! You finished the Raspberry Pi setup!

With the Home Assistant Operating System installed and accessible, you can now continue with onboarding.

Install Home Assistant Container

These below instructions are for an installation of Home Assistant Container running in your own container environment, which you manage yourself. Any OCI compatible runtime can be used, however this guide will focus on installing it with Docker.

Platform installation

Installation with Docker is straightforward. Adjust the following command so that:

• /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG points at the folder where you want to store your configuration and run it. Make sure that you keep the :/config part.

• MY_TIME_ZONE is a tz database name, like TZ=America/Los_Angeles.

  Install

  Update

  docker run -d \
    --name homeassistant \
    --privileged \
    --restart=unless-stopped \
    -e TZ=MY_TIME_ZONE \
    -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
    --network=host \
    ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
  

  # if this returns "Image is up to date" then you can stop here
  docker pull ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
  

  # stop the running container
  docker stop homeassistant
  

  # remove it from Docker's list of containers
  docker rm homeassistant
  

  # finally, start a new one
  docker run -d \
    --name homeassistant \
    --restart=unless-stopped \
    --privileged \
    -e TZ=MY_TIME_ZONE \
    -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
    --network=host \
    ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
  

  Once the Home Assistant Container is running Home Assistant should be accessible using http://<host>:8123 (replace with the hostname or IP of the system). You can continue with onboarding.

  Onboarding

  Restart Home Assistant

  If you change the configuration, you have to restart the server. To do that you have 3 options.

  1. In your Home Assistant UI, go to the Settings > System and click the Restart button.
  2. You can go to the Developer Tools > Services, select the service homeassistant.restart and select Call Service.
  3. Restart it from a terminal.
  Docker CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker restart homeassistant
  

  docker compose restart
  

  Docker compose

  docker compose should already be installed on your system. If not, you can manually install it.

  As the Docker command becomes more complex, switching to docker compose can be preferable and support automatically restarting on failure or system restart. Create a compose.yml file:

    version: '3'
    services:
      homeassistant:
        container_name: homeassistant
        image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
        volumes:
          - /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config
          - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
        restart: unless-stopped
        privileged: true
        network_mode: host
  

  Start it by running:

  docker compose up -d
  

  Once the Home Assistant Container is running, Home Assistant should be accessible using http://<host>:8123 (replace with the hostname or IP of the system). You can continue with onboarding.

  Onboarding

  Exposing devices

  In order to use Zigbee or other integrations that require access to devices, you need to map the appropriate device into the container. Ensure the user that is running the container has the correct privileges to access the /dev/tty* file, then add the device mapping to your container instructions:

  Docker CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker run ... --device /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0 ...
  

  version: '3'
  services:
    homeassistant:
      ...
      devices:
        - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0
  

  Optimizations

  The Home Assistant Container is using an alternative memory allocation library jemalloc for better memory management and Python runtime speedup.

  As jemalloc can cause issues on certain hardware, it can be disabled by passing the environment variable DISABLE_JEMALLOC with any value, for example:

  Docker CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker run ... -e "DISABLE_JEMALLOC=true" ...
  

  version: '3'
  services:
    homeassistant:
    ...
    environment:
      - DISABLE_JEMALLOC: true
  

  The error message <jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size is one known indicator.

  Install Home Assistant Core

  This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the system configuration you are using. When in doubt, please consider one of the other installation methods, as they might be a better fit instead.

  Prerequisites

  This guide assumes that you already have an operating system setup and have installed Python 3.11 (including the package python3-dev) or newer.

  Install dependencies

  Before you start, make sure your system is fully updated, all packages in this guide are installed with apt, if your OS does not have that, look for alternatives.

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade -y
  

  Install the dependencies:

  sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-dev python3-venv python3-pip bluez libffi-dev libssl-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf build-essential libopenjp2-7 libtiff5 libturbojpeg0-dev tzdata ffmpeg liblapack3 liblapack-dev libatlas-base-dev
  

  The above-listed dependencies might differ or missing, depending on your system or personal use of Home Assistant.

  Create an account

  Add an account for Home Assistant Core called homeassistant. Since this account is only for running Home Assistant Core the extra arguments of -rm is added to create a system account and create a home directory. The arguments -G dialout,gpio,i2c adds the user to the dialout, gpio and the i2c group. The first is required for using Z-Wave and Zigbee controllers, while the second is required to communicate with GPIO.

  sudo useradd -rm homeassistant -G dialout,gpio,i2c
  

  Create the virtual environment

  First we will create a directory for the installation of Home Assistant Core and change the owner to the homeassistant account.

  sudo mkdir /srv/homeassistant
  sudo chown homeassistant:homeassistant /srv/homeassistant
  

  Next up is to create and change to a virtual environment for Home Assistant Core. This will be done as the homeassistant account.

  sudo -u homeassistant -H -s
  cd /srv/homeassistant
  python3 -m venv .
  source bin/activate
  

  Once you have activated the virtual environment (notice the prompt change to (homeassistant) homeassistant@raspberrypi:/srv/homeassistant $) you will need to run the following command to install a required Python package.

  python3 -m pip install wheel
  

  Once you have installed the required Python package, it is now time to install Home Assistant Core!

  pip3 install homeassistant==2023.9.2
  

  Start Home Assistant Core for the first time. This will complete the installation for you, automatically creating the .homeassistant configuration directory in the /home/homeassistant directory, and installing any basic dependencies.

  hass
  

  You can now reach your installation via the web interface on http://homeassistant.local:8123.

  If this address doesn’t work you may also try http://localhost:8123 or http://X.X.X.X:8123 (replace X.X.X.X with your machines’ IP address).

  When you run the hass command for the first time, it will download, install and cache the necessary libraries/dependencies. This procedure may take anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes. During that time, you may get a site cannot be reached error when accessing the web interface. This will only happen the first time. Subsequent restarts will be much faster.

  Writing the image with Balena Etcher

  Use this procedure if Raspberry Pi Imager is not supported by your platform.

  1. Insert the SD card into the computer. Note: the contents of the card will be overwritten.

  2. Download and start Balena Etcher. You may need to run it with administrator privileges on Windows.

  3. Download the image to your computer.

     • Copy the correct URL for the Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 (Note: there are 2 different links below!):
  Raspberry Pi 4

  Raspberry Pi 3

  https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/10.5/haos_rpi4-64-10.5.img.xz
  

  https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/10.5/haos_rpi3-64-10.5.img.xz
  

  Select and copy the URL or use the “copy” button that appear when you hover it.

  4. Paste the URL into your browser to start the download.
  5. Select Flash from file and select the image you just downloaded.
     • Flash from URL does not work on some systems.

  6. Select target. 7. Select the SD card you want to use for your installation. 8. Select Flash! to start writing the image. 9. Once Balena Etcher has finished writing the image, you will see a confirmation.

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