Home Assistant Supervised Installation

Dec 5, 2022 · 4 mins read

In the video below, we show you how to do a Home Assistant Supervised Installation

There are lots of different ways to install Home Assistant

Personally I prefer to run this in a VM because you can take a snapshot prior to upgrades and rollback if things go thing wrong

Also, if you run this on say a Raspberry Pi for instance and that stops working, you’re home automatation will be out of service while you source a replacement computer and then restore Home Assistant

With a VM though, you can run it on another hypervisor until you can replace the broken computer

Although you can download and install Home Assistant as a pre-built VM, another option is to do a supervised installation

This involves instaling Home Assistant onto a Debian OS which brings the extra benefit of being able take advantage of features in Linux such as USB over IP for instance

Useful links:
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux/#install-home-assistant-supervised
https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/adr/0014-home-assistant-supervised.md
https://github.com/home-assistant/os-agent/releases

Assumptions:
It is assumed that you already have a hypervisor to run this on, but Proxmox VE is recommended
As even the FBI warn, security is something you need to take seriously with smart home devices
While you can use a software firewall like UFW on a Debian computer, Proxmox VE also provides a firewall option
The benefit of using the firewall in Proxmox VE is that’s independent of the VM, meaning only a Proxmox administrator can make changes to it
It also avoids some of the complications of the extra rules required to support Docker for instance

Steps Taken:

Debian OS
Debian OS is supported so you need to create a VM with Debian installed
This should either have a static IP address or a reserved IP address in DHCP
By default, there is no support for sudo so switch to root
```
su -  
```
And make sure the OS is up to date
```
apt update && apt upgrade -y  
```

Install Dependencies

apt install apparmor jq wget curl udisks2 libglib2.0-bin network-manager dbus systemd-journal-remote -y

This can take a while

Install Docker-CE
The Docker Community Edition is supported so install this
```
curl -fsSL get.docker.com | sh  
```
This can take a while
Install HA OS Agent
The OS agent for HA needs to be installed to allow communication with the OS
TIP: Check for the latest version
https://github.com/home-assistant/os-agent/releases

Download and install the package
```
wget https://github.com/home-assistant/os-agent/releases/download/1.4.1/os-agent_1.4.1_linux_x86_64.deb  
dpkg -i os-agent_1.4.1_linux_x86_64.deb  
```
TIP: Copy the URL in the web browser
Install HA Supervised Download the package
```
  
wget https://github.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/releases/latest/download/homeassistant-supervised.deb -O homeassistant-supervised.deb  
```
The -O parameter is to overwrite the existing file, if it exists, otherwise you’ll just keep downloading an extra file but install the first version that was first downloaded

Install the package
```
  
dpkg -i homeassistant-supervised.deb  
```
Now reboot the computer
Onboarding With the installation complete and the computer back up and running, point your web browser to port 8123 of the computer
E.g. http://192.168.100.20:8213

NOTE: At this stage, HTTPS is not available
Wait for the HA wizard to become available and then follow the process
Updating Home Assistant
Assuming the computer is a VM, delete any previous snapshots then create a new one before performing an update. If anything goes wrong you can then revert to the working instance
To update Debian use the normal apt update && apt upgrade process. Reboot the host from within the HA GUI if a reboot is suggested
To update Home Assistant Core you can do this as normal in the GUI whenever an update is announced. The update process will do a reboot automatically
Add-ons and integrations can be updated as normal as well
To update the OS agent, check for the latest version and then download and install that using the previous steps. This will overwrite the existing version. Reboot the host from within the HA GUI
If a Supervisor update is required, download and install that using the previous steps. This will overwrite the existing version if the -O option is used. Reboot the host from within the HA GUI
Troubleshooting For problems check the logs in HA or check the operating system logs
```
  
journalctl -f
```