I love Home Assistant, but...
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.
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.
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.
Reading all of these replying I'm starting to think that maybe my problem was assuming that because add-ons are Docker container they should be treated as such.
There's alternative installation methods.
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
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.