Home Assistant Container on Raspberry Pi

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 apps. 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 type 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 compatible runtime can be used, but the documentation focus is on Docker. [Learn more] method to install Home Assistant. Before you continue, be aware of the limitations and differences compared to 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 apps. 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 type for most users.. You can find more information on the installation page. Most notably, apps are only available with the Home Assistant Operating System.

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 compatible runtime can be used, but the documentation focus is on Docker. [Learn more] running in your own container environment, which you manage yourself. Any OCI compatible runtime can be used, however this guide will focus on installing it with Docker.

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.

  Install

  Update

  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 (replace with 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.

  1. In your Home Assistant UI, go to Settings > System and in the top-right corner, select the three dots menu. Then, select Restart Home Assistant.
  2. Go to Settings > Tools > Actions, select homeassistant.restart and select Perform action.
  3. Restart it from a terminal.
  Docker CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker restart homeassistant
  

  docker compose restart
  

  Allow time for a clean shutdown

  When the container is stopped or restarted, Docker sends SIGTERM and then forcibly stops the container after a timeout, which is 10 seconds by default. Home Assistant can need longer than that to close its database. If it is stopped before it has finished, the next start logs warnings such as:

  Ended unfinished session
  The system could not validate that the sqlite3 database at //config/home-assistant_v2.db was shutdown cleanly
  

  To give the shutdown more time, increase the timeout:

  Docker CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker run ... --stop-timeout 60 ...
  

  services:
    homeassistant:
      ...
      stop_grace_period: 60s
  

  The timeout is an upper limit, not a delay: Docker continues as soon as Home Assistant has exited.

  Note

  This setting is applied when the container is created, so restarting an existing container keeps the timeout it was created with. After changing the value in compose.yaml, docker compose up -d recreates the container, because its configuration has changed. If the container is not recreated, use docker compose up -d --force-recreate. With the Docker CLI, remove the container and run it again with the new option.

  Docker compose

  Tip

  docker compose should already be installed on 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 a compose.yaml 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
        stop_grace_period: 60s
        privileged: true
        network_mode: host
        environment:
          TZ: Europe/Amsterdam
  

  Start it by running:

  docker compose up -d
  

  Once the Home Assistant Container is running, Home Assistant should be accessible using http://<host>:8123 (replace with 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 CLI

  Docker Compose

  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 CLI

  Docker Compose

  docker run ... -e "DISABLE_JEMALLOC=true" ...
  

  services:
    homeassistant:
    ...
      environment:
        DISABLE_JEMALLOC: true
  

  The error message <jemalloc>: Unsupported system page size is one known indicator.

  Related topics

  • Installing the home assistant os on raspberry pi

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