this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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It's true some things are harder to do in the container configuration; it's easier installed as an OS, especially integrations like Z-Wave, ZigBee, RTSP, Eufy, ESP, and so on. All of these require running other software, and in containers it's a fair bit of fussing with port and host OS device connections.
I've always run it in a container, without issue. It works fine, but I'm comfortable with the command line and LXC. That said, flashing an ESP hardware device and getting it connected to HA running in a container has so far defeated me, because I have to give access to the device in the configuration of the container before I run it, but the device flashing process itself is time limited and expects a process to be waiting on it when it is connected. It's a chicken/egg problem I haven't yet figured out which wouldn't be a problem if I were running the HA OS.
HA isn't the only software that just works better when it controls the while OS. Kodi is another that encourages users heavily to running it as an OS.
Regardless, it runs fine via
and there's a package in AUR that wraps the container up with a systemd service - it's as close to a bare package install as you're likely to get.
What's a little funny to me is that, despite that I've been running HA in a container for the past 4 years, I'm working towards getting a dedicated device and running HA OS on it. If we ever move out of this house, I'm not going to spend weeks going around replacing all of the hardware - smart sockets, lights, garage door opener, security, etc etc - with dumb devices; and for any of that to be worth anything, it's going to need a controller configured for it, which means, I'm planning on selling the HA server device with the house. For that case, I don't want anything but HA running on that device, and for that, it'd just be easier and smoother to run HAOS.
My advice is to run HA in a container until you are sure that's the direction you want to go, but not for so long that it's going to be a PITA to migrate to a dedicated server. But - hey, just IMHO - plan on running HAOS. If I knew then what I know now, that's what I would have done.