This Helm chart bootstraps a Home Assistant instance on Kubernetes, supports configurable persistence, controller types, add-ons (e.g. code-server), and is auto-updated with new Home Assistant releases.
For over two years, I have been running Home Assistant on Home Assistant Green, which comes pre-installed with Home Assistant OS.
The device has been working perfectly well for all of my smart home needs. Even though it is not the most cost-effective way to run Home Assistant, it is a well-designed device, fast enough for my needs and power efficient.
If I were buying a new dedicated device for Home Assistant today, I may have preferred to get a mini PC instead, since some mini PCs are similar in price to the HA Green but significantly more powerful (though maybe not as power efficient). However, I would still strive to run Home Assistant with Home Assistant OS.
On recent podcast episodes of Linux Unplugged (including LINUX Unplugged 637: Chris’ Smart Home Disaster), Chris talked about considering a move away from the Home Assistant Yellow (which is more powerful than the HA Green), perhaps towards a mini PC running multiple services (rather than just a mini PC). Chris also debated the benefits of running Home Assistant on NixOS vs Home Assistant OS. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Chris’s long-standing stance that it’s best to give Home Assistant its own device, because of how essential it can be to a home.
I run all my other self-hosted services in containers. Why not Home Assistant as well? The reason is that Home Assistant OS makes everything easy. Notably, Home Assistant Container installations don’t have access to add-ons.
Add-ons are additional standalone third-party software packages that can be installed on Home Assistant OS. \[Learn more\]
Although Add-ons are really just containers, and many Home Assistant users manage to install them as separate containers, this requires elaborate configurations to make the different containers work together with Home Assistant. Even though I’ve been doing Docker Compose stacks (for example, applications that have multiple containers including a database), the moment I found out that HAOS allows one-click installation of Add-ons, I immediately gravitated towards that simplicity. Some examples of Add-ons that I use and rely on are Matter Server, Zigbee2MQTT and Music Assistant.
Backups are also fairly simple on HAOS.
Nevertheless, I do find the idea of this Home Assistant Helm Chart compelling. Features such as replicas and partial add-ons support make this an interesting alternative to HAOS. I may run a test deployment in my parent’s home, since that’s where my homelab cluster is.
Featured image by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash.
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