Advanced Raspberry Pi installation
While we recommend using the Home Assistant Operating SystemHome Assistant OS, the Home Assistant Operating System, is an embedded, minimalistic, operating system designed to run the Home Assistant ecosystem on single board computers (like the Raspberry Pi) or Virtual Machines. It includes Home Assistant Core, the Home Assistant Supervisor, and supports add-ons. Home Assistant Supervisor keeps it up to date, removing the need for you to manage an operating system. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation method for most users., you can also use the Home Assistant ContainerHome Assistant Container is a standalone container-based installation of Home Assistant Core. Any OCI
Install Home Assistant Container
These below instructions are for an installation of Home Assistant ContainerHome Assistant Container is a standalone container-based installation of Home Assistant Core. Any OCI
This installation method does not have access to add-ons. If you want to use add-ons, you need to use another installation method. The recommended method is Home Assistant Operating SystemHome Assistant OS, the Home Assistant Operating System, is an embedded, minimalistic, operating system designed to run the Home Assistant ecosystem on single board computers (like the Raspberry Pi) or Virtual Machines. It includes Home Assistant Core, the Home Assistant Supervisor, and supports add-ons. Home Assistant Supervisor keeps it up to date, removing the need for you to manage an operating system. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation method for most users.. Checkout the overview table of installation types to see the differences.
Prerequisites This guide assumes that you already have an operating system setup and a container runtime installed (like Docker).
If you are using Docker then you need to be on at least version 19.03.9, ideally an even higher version, and libseccomp
2.4.2 or newer. Docker Desktop will not work, you must use Docker Engine.
Platform installation
Installation with Docker is straightforward. Adjust the following command so that:
-
/PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG
points at the folder where you want to store your configuration and run it. Make sure that you keep the:/config
part. -
MY_TIME_ZONE
is a tz database name, like TZ=America/Los_Angeles
. -
D-Bus is optional but required if you plan to use the Bluetooth integration.
docker run -d \ --name homeassistant \ --privileged \ --restart=unless-stopped \ -e TZ=MY_TIME_ZONE \ -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \ -v /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro \ --network=host \ ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
# if this returns "Image is up to date" then you can stop here docker pull ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
# stop the running container docker stop homeassistant
# remove it from Docker's list of containers docker rm homeassistant
# finally, start a new one docker run -d \ --name homeassistant \ --restart=unless-stopped \ --privileged \ -e TZ=MY_TIME_ZONE \ -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \ -v /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro \ --network=host \ ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable
Once the Home Assistant Container is running Home Assistant should be accessible using
http://<host>:8123
(replacewith the hostname or IP of the system). You can continue with onboarding. Onboarding Restart Home Assistant
If you change the configuration, you have to restart the server. To do that you have 3 options.
- In your Home Assistant UI, go to the Settings > System and click the Restart button.
- You can go to the Developer Tools > Actions, select
homeassistant.restart
and select Perform action. - Restart it from a terminal.
docker restart homeassistant
docker compose restart
Docker compose
Tip docker compose
should already be installedon your system. If not, you can manually install it. As the Docker command becomes more complex, switching to
docker compose
can be preferable and support automatically restarting on failure or system restart. Create acompose.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
(replacewith the hostname or IP of the system). You can continue with onboarding. 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.