Alternative

Install Home Assistant Operating System

Download the appropriate image

• VirtualBox (.vdi)

• KVM/Proxmox (.qcow2)

• VMware ESXi/vSphere (.ova)

After downloading, decompress the image. If the image comes in a ZIP file, for example, unzip it.

Follow this guide if you already are running a supported virtual machine hypervisor. If you are not familiar with virtual machines, install Home Assistant OS directly on a Home Assistant Yellow, a Raspberry Pi, or an ODROID.

Create the virtual machine

Load the appliance image into your virtual machine hypervisor. (Note: You are free to assign as much resources as you wish to the VM, please assign enough based on your add-on needs).

Minimum recommended assignments:

• 2 GB RAM
• 32 GB Storage
• 2vCPU

All these can be extended if your usage calls for more resources.

Hypervisor specific configuration

VBoxManage storageattach <VM name> --storagectl "SATA" --port 0 --device 0 --nonrotational on --discard on

virt-install --name haos --description "Home Assistant OS" --os-variant=generic --ram=4096 --vcpus=2 --disk <PATH TO QCOW2 FILE>,bus=scsi --controller type=scsi,model=virtio-scsi --import --graphics none --boot uefi

   Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
   Bus 003 Device 004: ID 30c9:0052 Luxvisions Innotech Limited Integrated RGB Camera
   Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1a86:55d4 QinHeng Electronics SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2
   Bus 003 Device 002: ID 06cb:00fc Synaptics, Inc. 
   Bus 003 Device 005: ID 8087:0033 Intel Corp. 
   Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
   Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
   Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

virt-install --name haos --description "Home Assistant OS" --os-variant=generic --ram=4096 --vcpus=2 --disk <PATH TO QCOW2 FILE>,bus=scsi --controller type=scsi,model=virtio-scsi --import --graphics none --boot uefi --hostdev 003.003

Start up your virtual machine

1. Start the virtual machine.
2. Observe the boot process of the Home Assistant Operating System.
3. Once completed, 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 ’s IP address).

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

Install Home Assistant Container

Synology NAS

Synology with DSM now supports container management through the Container Manager package, allowing you to install Home Assistant without the need for command-line. For details about the package (including compatibility-information, if your NAS is supported), see https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages/ContainerManager The steps would be:

• Install Docker “Container Manager” package on your Synology NAS
• Launch Container Manager-app and move to “Registry”-section
• Find “homeassistant/home-assistant” within registry and click on “Download”. Choose the “stable” tag.
• Wait for some time until your NAS has pulled the image
• Move to the “Image”-section of the “Container Manager”-app
• Click on “Launch”
• Within “Network” select “Use same network as Docker Host” and click Next
• Choose a container-name you want (e.g., “homeassistant”)
• Set “Enable auto-restart” if you like
• Click on “Advanced Settings”. To ensure that Home Assistant displays the correct timezone go to the “Environment” tab and click the plus sign then add variable = TZ & value = Europe/London choosing your correct timezone. Click Save to exit Advanced Settings.
• Click Next
• Within “Volume Settings” click on “Add Folder” and choose either an existing folder or add a new folder (e.g. in “docker” shared folder, add new folder named “homeassistant” and then within that new folder add another new folder “config”), then click Select. Then edit the “mount path” to be “/config”. This configures where Home Assistant will store configs and logs.
• Ensure “Run this container after the wizard is finished” is checked and click Done
• Your Home Assistant within Docker should now run and will serve the web interface from port 8123 on your Docker host (this will be your Synology NAS IP address - for example http://192.168.1.10:8123)

If you are using the built-in firewall, you must also add the port 8123 to allowed list. This can be found in “Control Panel -> Security” and then the Firewall tab. Click “Edit Rules” besides the Firewall Profile dropdown box. Create a new rule and select “Custom” for Ports and add 8123. Edit Source IP if you like or leave it at default “All”. Action should stay at “Allow”.

To use a Z-Wave USB stick for Z-Wave control, the HA Docker container needs extra configuration to access to the USB stick. While there are multiple ways to do this, the least privileged way of granting access can only be performed via the Terminal, at the time of writing. See this page for configuring Terminal access to your Synology NAS:

https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/DSM/AdminCenter/system_terminal

Adjust the following Terminal command as follows :

• Replace /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG points at the folder where you want to store your configuration - make sure that you keep the :/config part
• Replace /PATH_TO_YOUR_USB_STICK matches the path for your USB stick (e.g., /dev/ttyACM0 for most Synology users)
• Replace “Australia/Melbourne” with your timezone

Run it in Terminal.

sudo docker run --restart always -d --name homeassistant -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config --device=/PATH_TO_YOUR_USB_STICK -e TZ=Australia/Melbourne --net=host ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable

Complete the remainder of the Z-Wave configuration by following the instructions here.

Remark: to update your Home Assistant on your Docker within Synology NAS, you just have to do the following:

• Go to the “Container Manager”-app and move to “Image”-section
• Find “homeassistant/home-assistant” within Image and click on “Update”.
• Wait until the system-message/-notification comes up, that the download is finished (there is no progress bar)
• Move to “Container”-section
• Stop your container if it’s running
• Right-click on it and select “Action”->“Reset”. You won’t lose any data, as all files are stored in your configuration-directory
• Start the container again - it will then boot up with the new Home Assistant image

Remark: to restart your Home Assistant within Synology NAS, you just have to do the following:

• Go to the “Container Manager”-app and move to “Container”-section
• Right-click on it and select “Action”->“Restart”.

QNAP NAS

QNAP with QTS supports Docker, allowing you to install Home Assistant using Docker without the need for command-line. For details about the package (including compatibility-information, if your NAS is supported), see https://www.qnap.com/solution/container_station/en/index.php

The steps would be:

• Install “Container Station” package on your Qnap NAS
• Launch Container Station and move to “Create Container”-section
• Search image “homeassistant/home-assistant” with Docker Hub and click on “Install” Make attention to CPU architecture of your NAS. For ARM CPU types the correct image is “homeassistant/armhf-homeassistant”
• Choose “stable” version and click next
• Choose a container-name you want (e.g., “homeassistant”)
• Click on “Advanced Settings”
• Within “Shared Folders” click on “Volume from host” > “Add” and choose either an existing folder or add a new folder. The “mount point has to be /config, so that Home Assistant will use it for the configuration and logs.
• Within “Network” and select Network Mode to “Host”
• To ensure that Home Assistant displays the correct timezone go to the “Environment” tab and click the plus sign then add variable = TZ & value = Europe/London choosing your correct timezone
• Click on “Create”
• Wait for some time until your NAS has created the container
• Your Home Assistant within Docker should now run and will serve the web interface from port 8123 on your Docker host (this will be your Qnap NAS IP address - for example http://192.xxx.xxx.xxx:8123)

Remark: To update your Home Assistant on your Docker within Qnap NAS, you just remove container and image and do steps again (Don’t remove “config” folder).

Community Notes

Note that some users have reported issues creating Home Assistant containers on ARM QNAP systems (e.g., TS-233) with Container Station 3. A possible workaround is the “Docker compose” approach based on a YAML file (see section “Docker compose”). In the QNAP Container Station 3 UI, this can be accessed by going to the “Applications” section and clicking on “Create”. You are then prompted to enter YAML code, which can be copied from that shown in the “Docker compose” section. Take care to modify this code in two ways: firstly, add a first line reading “version: ‘3’”; secondly, replace the text “/PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG” by a valid path on your NAS system, e.g., “/share/Container/HomeAssistant/config”.

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.

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 > Actions, select homeassistant.restart and select Perform action.
3. 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 compose.yml file:

  services:
    homeassistant:
      container_name: homeassistant
      image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
      volumes:
        - /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config
        - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
        - /run/dbus:/run/dbus: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.

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

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 the jemalloc configuration used can cause issues on certain hardware featuring a page size larger than 4K (like some specific ARM64-based SoCs), it can be disabled by passing the environment variable DISABLE_JEMALLOC with any value, for example:

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

services:
  homeassistant:
  ...
    environment:
      DISABLE_JEMALLOC: true

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

Community provided guides

Additional installation guides can be found on our Community Forum.

These Community Guides are provided as-is. Some of these install methods are more limited than the methods above. Some integrations may not work due to limitations of the platform.