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 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 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 find more information on the installation page. Most notably, add-ons 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.

Note

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.

Important

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 (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 the Settings > System and click the Restart button.
    2. You can go to the Developer Tools > Actions, select homeassistant.restart and select Perform action.
    3. Restart it from a terminal.
    docker restart homeassistant
    
    docker compose restart
    

    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.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 (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 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.