Raspberry Pi
Please remember to ensure you’re using an appropriate power supply with your Pi. Mobile chargers may not be suitable, since some are designed to only provide the full power with that manufacturer’s handsets. USB ports on your computer also will not supply enough power and must not be used.
Install Home Assistant Operating System
Follow this guide if you want to get started with Home Assistant easily or if you have little to no Linux experience
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.
- Power Supply (at least 3A)
- 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. Home Assistant can work with Wi-Fi, but an Ethernet connection would be more reliable.
Write the image to your installation media
-
Attach the installation media (SD card) to your computer
-
Download and start Balena Etcher
-
Select “Flash from URL”
-
Get the URL for your Raspberry Pi:
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/5.12/hassos_rpi4-64-5.12.img.xz
(For GPIO and HAT 32-bit is required)
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/5.12/hassos_rpi4-5.12.img.xz
(To use the full 8GB of memory on the 8GB model 64-bit is required)
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/5.12/hassos_rpi3-64-5.12.img.xz
(For GPIO and HAT 32-bit is required)
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/5.12/hassos_rpi3-5.12.img.xz
Select and copy the URL or use the “copy” button that appear when you hover it.
- Paste the URL for your Raspberry Pi into Balena Etcher and click “OK”
- Balena Etcher will now download the image, when that is done click “Select target”
- Select the SD card you want to use for your Raspberry Pi
- Click on “Flash!” to start writing the image
- When Balena Etcher is finished writing the image you will get this confirmation
Start up your Raspberry Pi
- Insert the installation media (SD card) you just created
- Attach a ethernet cable for network.
- Attach a cable for power
- Within a few minutes you will be able to reach Home Assistant on homeassistant.local:8123. If you are running an older Windows version or have a stricter network configuration, you might need to access Home Assistant at homeassistant:8123 or
http://X.X.X.X:8123
(replace X.X.X.X with your Raspberry Pi’s IP address).
With the Home Assistant Operating System installed and accessible you can continue with onboarding.
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.
This guide assumes that you already have an operating system setup and a container runtime installed (like 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.
Raspberry pi 3
docker run --init -d \
--name homeassistant \
--restart=unless-stopped \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
-v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
--network=host \
homeassistant/raspberrypi3-homeassistant:stable
# if this returns "Image is up to date" then you can stop here
docker pull homeassistant/raspberrypi3-homeassistant: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 --init -d \
--name homeassistant \
--restart=unless-stopped \
-v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
--network=host \
homeassistant/raspberrypi3-homeassistant:stable
Raspberry pi 4
docker run --init -d \
--name homeassistant \
--restart=unless-stopped \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
-v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
--network=host \
homeassistant/raspberrypi4-homeassistant:stable
# if this returns "Image is up to date" then you can stop here
docker pull homeassistant/raspberrypi4-homeassistant: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 --init -d \
--name homeassistant \
--restart=unless-stopped \
-v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
--network=host \
homeassistant/raspberrypi4-homeassistant:stable
Once the Home Assistant Container is running Home Assistant should be accessible using http://<host>:8123
(replace
Onboarding
Restart Home Assistant
If you change the configuration you have to restart the server. To do that you have 3 options.
- In your Home Assistant UI go to the Configuration panel -> Server management and click the “Restart” button.
- You can go to the Developer Tools -> Services, select the service
homeassistant.restart
and click “Call Service”. - Restart it from a terminal.
docker restart homeassistant
docker-compose restart
Docker Compose
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 docker-compose.yml
file:
Raspberry pi 3
version: '3'
services:
homeassistant:
container_name: homeassistant
image: homeassistant/raspberrypi3-homeassistant:stable
volumes:
- /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
restart: unless-stopped
network_mode: host
Raspberry pi 4
version: '3'
services:
homeassistant:
container_name: homeassistant
image: homeassistant/raspberrypi4-homeassistant:stable
volumes:
- /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
restart: unless-stopped
network_mode: host
Start it by running:
docker-compose up -d
Exposing Devices
In order to use Z-Wave, 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 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 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 guide assumes that you already have an operating system setup and have installed Python 3.8 (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 libffi-dev libssl-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf build-essential libopenjp2-7 libtiff5
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
python3.8 -m venv .
source bin/activate
Once you have activated the virtual environment (notice the prompt change to (homeassistant) [email protected]:/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
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 on your Raspberry Pi over the web interface on http://homeassistant.local:8123
.
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 “site cannot be reached” error when accessing the web interface. This will only happen for the first time, and subsequent restarts will be much faster.
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