I own a couple TP-Link Tapo Wi-fi light bulbs. Currently, each family member installs an app on the phone to control the light bulbs. I wonder if there’s a way to do the same but in a browser (via docker app on my NAS). And because we may use smart devices of other brands in the future, it seems too much trouble to install yet another app on each phone.
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HomeAssistant?
That’s what home assistant is built to do. There is a docker version, but I hit limits pretty quick and fired up an old raspberry pi running HomeassistantOS
One app, many devices & brands, custom interfaces for each member.
What limits did you hit?
It was many, many years ago, but if I recall some of the add-ons or installations didn’t work in the docker version. I started with docker on a Synology server, but I gave up on the whole project for a year until I found a Pi in a drawer I forgot I had.
HAOS just feels more “complete” to me.
Addons on HAOS are just Docker containers. When you use HA in Docker you have to just install the addons you like yourself as containers next to HA. It gives you more freedom to change settings for the “addons” when you install them yourself, but it is also a little more work. I think it is still worth it because you can also just install whatever you want. I run a minecraft server for example on the same server.
HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??
I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.
Haha! I feel like I got a little roasted and have some learning to do, but this hobby is all good fun.
I’m definitely not hating on docker. I use it for dozens of containers across several machines and love how easy it is, and even some of the fights we’ve had. If that works for people’s needs, awesome!
I really wish I remembered what the error was. It’s been bugging me all day. Maybe it’s not a thing anymore.
Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.
Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!
Nginx Proxy Manager is for scrubs, anyone who doesn’t code their confs by hand is subhuman!
/s
Do you have anything more to back up the claims about haos breaking privacy other than sone DNS queries? Just because there is a DNS query doesn’t mean any actual data is being sent. I’m only asking because I’d be sad to hear if there are really issues. HA is fully open source so I’m surprised if this is really and issue.
I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.
Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.
Can you link me to an example or show me an example docker compose yml that adds an addon? I currently run a script that manually installs all my addons to the docker container by copying. Maybe you can show me with this: https://github.com/danielperna84/custom_homematic or any other really.
My best advice is to NOT think of it as addons. If you want grafana or node red for example, just install them in seperate in a container not considering anything else about HA. Then just use them normally. You can still use the integrations for grafana and node red. Integrations work perfectly fine on HA in a Docker container.
Remember, very important: INTEGRATIONS ARE NOT ADDONS they are two very different things.
Ah. I’m running HA out of docker currently and haven’t hit any walls, but I’m not exactly pushing it. There’s an annoyance where I have to tell HA to trust my docker’s default IP, and there was some reverse-proxy messing around I had to do to get it working on my network. Once it’s up and loaded, it’s indistinguishably HomeAssistant.
I run mine behind a reverse proxy too and had to do that as well. Seems like a common thing there should be a system config for.
HomeAssistant and PiHole are the gateway drugs to selfhosting.
Home Assistant
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Nice, this looks promising. I’ll try it out.
Just throw it in a VM and try it out that way if you can. The Docker version is just the Home Assistant part but if you run the VM you can run HAOS which is the “Supervised” version that can install add-ons to. There is a way to run Supervised in Docker but it’s not supported (and when my version died it was devastating)
Thanks so much for the advice. Easy of use is a major concern for family members, however. My plan is to open the web page on a tablet and put it in the living room then the family doesn’t need to use a phone. I’ll look into both options.
You can do that with Supervised too. I have a tablet on the wall, I’m the only one that uses it lol
Home Assistant!
I use Home Assistant for controlling my smart lights. They do support Docker, but I installed it as a VM with KVM. You get more features with it, such as add-ons. But you should definitely look into your options. They have a diagram on this page.
To be fair, the add-ons are just containers installed and managed by HA. In most cases, you can install all of them as separate containers via something like Docker, but configuration takes more steps (though you also get more control).
Example: I have HA, Eclipse mosquitto, zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui, node-red, Grafana, and influxdb all running as docker containers on two different devices (my main HA host wasn’t ideal for Zigbee and zwave USB dongles, so those are on a Pi 4). The other containers are accessible separately or from within HA as iFrame panels.
If you (and the people who want to use these things) are on iOS, you could consider Homebridge
It is easier than a full home assistant install, and may be sufficient for what you want to do.
Home assistant might be overkill for your application (but it can do a lot more stuff)
I started on home assistant with just a couple Smart bulbs and oh boy has it gotten out of hand since then lol. Home bridge sounds good if that’s all that’s needed though.
Its so weirdly addictive, started with proxmox, then to home assistant, now I have frigate handling PoE cameras, every bedroom has a morning alarm light automation, the vacuum starts itself, its ridiculous
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) PoE Power over Ethernet Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #594 for this sub, first seen 12th Mar 2024, 05:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I don’t know if tapo plugs are supported, but this git code lets you turn tplink kasa plugs into local server activated plugs so you don’t have to use tplink app for activation online. Then homeassistant is a great tool for control
https://github.com/jkbenaim/hs100
Also worked on dimmable switches
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Home Assistant hates it if you install anything else on your server besides Home Assistant. Don’t even think about running other docker containers besides HA or you’ll get persistent nags and it’ll prevent you from updating without doing workarounds
I am running home assistant as a docker. I also run >10 other docker containers on the same server. It works fine. There are minor issues (like the „add to my home assistant“ button on the website does not work) but it is far from what you are saying.
