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.
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
Have you considered not using the Home Assistant OS? You don’t need to run it to use Home Assistant. You can instead set your host up with some other OS, like Debian, and then run Home Assistant in a docker container (or containers, plural) and run any other containers you want.
I’m not doing this myself so can’t speak to its limitations, but from what I’ve heard, if you’re familiar with Docker then it’s pretty straightforward.
A lot of apps use hard coded paths, so using a subdomain per app makes it much easier to use them all. Traefik has middleware, including stripPrefix, which allow you to strip a path prefix before forwarding the path to the app, though - have you tried that approach?
MaggiWuerze@feddit.de 11 months ago
You can’t use add-ons when running HA as a docker container, which basically lobotomizes it.
Maximilious@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
infeeeee@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Addons are just other containers, you can run them next to ha
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Add ons are just shitty packaging of other software. Just run the other software directly.
aksdb@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What kind of addons? I have HACS and it works fine.
hai@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
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
Dockerfile
ordocker-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.
Celestus@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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
sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 11 months ago
There’s alternative installation methods.
aksdb@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Strip prefix won’t work if the frontend expects to find paths at absolute locations. You would need to patch the html, css and js on the fly, which is somewhere between ugly and (almost) impossible.
I would also suggest to simply use custom (sub) domains. Especially in your intranet you can have whatever domains you want.
hai@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
This is what I’ve seen would be the only “feasible” way of getting HA to work behind a subpath, in my opinion this only works for very small application though (not something as complex as Home Assistant).
hai@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
I’m (currently) on Raspberry Pi OS (as I need something that “just works”). Home Assistant is running in Docker like everything else.
I should’ve mentioned this, but I’m using Nginx (I really enjoy the simplicity of just having to add a section to a file whenever I want to add something). Before running HAOS I was running RPIOS again and used Traefik, it worked (but felt like a lot more work to setup than just a plain Nginx setup).
sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 11 months ago
This was going to be my suggestion. Just run home assistant as a Docker container, problem solved!
hai@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Still no subpaths, changing default authentication providers, and there can still be workarounds that feel hackish (I’ve used HA is a container before) the difference is that you’ll do less in Home Assistant, so you avoid them as much as possible.