Home Assistant Tutorial Part 1 - Installation

Home Assistant is an amazing Home Automation hub, with tons of support for various devices, a friendly web UI, and tons of expandability. It's free, open source, and has a huge community. This video will guide newcomers to home assistant through tutorials to help them get setup and make the most of it. It's designed to be very beginner friendly.
There are several supported ways to install Home Assistant, and each comes with trade offs. In this video I'll explain the options, the trade offs, and we'll take a look at what you should consider about how you want to use the device to help you decide. If you're looking for reliability, and money is worth more than time, A VM install in Unraid or Hyper-V may be your best bet. If you're comfortable with the command line, then Proxmox or ESXI can help. And if you're just looking to start out cheaply, then a simple image of an SD card will get you up and running.
This is meant to replace my old tutorial which has long since become outdated. Terms like 'Hass.io' no longer apply, as there's been a great renaming since that video.
Supervised install video • Home Assistant Supervi...
Home Assistant Install reference: www.home-assis...
Home Assistant images - www.home-assis...
Proxmox Tutorial via Dr. Zzs (Excellent channel that you definitely want to follow if you get into Home Assistant!) - • Basics of a Proxmox In...
Setting up wifi for a Raspberry pi installation: github.com/hom...
Affiliate links that support the channel:
64 Gig A2 class Micro SD Card - amzn.to/2G7DjsT
Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kit: amzn.to/2EIFmmA
Home Assistant tutorial Series:
Part 5 - HACS and Themes - • Home Assistant Tutoria...
Part 4 - Automations BluePrints Scripts and Scenes
• Home Assistant Tutoria...
Part 3 - Cameras • Home Assistant Tutoria...
Part 2 - UI Walkthroughs, Integrations, Addons, and Cloud Backups • Home Assistant Tutori...
Part 1 - Installation - • Home Assistant Tutori...
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#homeassistant #tutorial #install

[@jacobsamdal9611]

Couple things that might help solve problems for people. I had to turn on virtualization in Bios. Which is fine..I knew that but some might not know about it. Second you need to change the file to .qcow2 if youre having issues as well. Hope this helps someone in UNRAID

[@geektoolkit]

Oh good call!!! I forget the virtualization step so often. Thankyou I’ll get this pinned it’ll help others for sure

[@jacobsamdal9611]

@@geektoolkit No Problem! I was just lucky enough to get the error and thought dang I've never done virtualization on this so I bet it's not even enabled. Once enabled I got no errors!! Next step is getting into home assistant haven't been able to get the IP address yet though..

[@geektoolkit]

I try to ping homeassistant.local, but I also use advancedip scanner (windows, free) or fing (I think that’s iOS). Basically a free up scanner can help find it or if you check the routers assigned up tables that can help

[@jacobsamdal9611]

@@geektoolkit I gave up on it for the day. I accidentally reset my router instead of rebooting and I've been having issues with the router already so it's postponed for another day to learn. Otherwise I get too frustrated! I like angry up scanner! Works well for windows! That's what I've used before anyways

[@MaxGoddur]

Hi, I found your video part 4 and thought ok this guy sounds like he is addressing my areas of "how-to" in beginners language. So I searched and found part 1. Now off I go to watch and learn some basics. Thank you for the videos.

[@geektoolkit]

Yay! It's a fun journey, glad you found them! I tried to take a different approach to other's I'd seen, so hoping this helps and makes sense in how I laid them out. I try to go over the lingo so that I'm not rushing through things, it may slow some of it down but I hope it gives a better understanding in the end

[@MaxGoddur]

@@geektoolkit explaing things in detail is the key and many folks I have talked to many users of HA and NR and they are fustrated with the lack of step by step intructions on how to do stuff. To many YTers state "it is easy" or they leave steps out. This is a welcome find.

[@junrosamura645]

You probably have the most easiest to understand the various ways HA is installed. You do go off track towards the middle but very informative.

[@geektoolkit]

Thankyou! It's very tough to put some of this into a logical Point A to Point B direction, and I'm always working to get better at that, while also not going so fast that I blow by information that I think will be relevant. My goal at the end is that someone that watches it doesn't just know 'how', but also a bit of 'why' so that if things go sideways they at least have enough info to recover. Always working to get better, and I appreciate the kind comments and the feedback!

[@michaels7828]

Thank you very much for your videos! I especially like your way of presenting technical information in well organized, sequential, and deep engineering form. I also thank you for making series of videos on an individual topics of HA to better explain a complexity of those topics.

[@geektoolkit]

Thankyou!! Yeah I want to do it a bit different than the way I’ve seen it done. For instance if we talk security cameras I think it’s worth not just saying RTSP but understanding a little deeper of what that protocol is and why it’s interesting

[@jamegrabham9992]

Great video Joe... I started HA on a PI 3 and after the first year went to a VM on Proxmox...very snappy...:)

[@geektoolkit]

Thankyou! Yeah I feel like alot of us start with the pi, but then almost grow past it. That's what happened to me. Now that I have a VM, I don't ever want to go back to a pi!

[@chrisrudek2076]

Wow such a great video. You have a new subscriber

[@geektoolkit]

Thankyou!!!! I really appreciate the support!

[@neilbrown3281]

Great video, but now I'm doubting how I'm installing my setup🤦‍♂️. Just wondering, are you running an MQTT broker aswell? If so, where

[@geektoolkit]

I’ll be running Mosquito as a Home assistant addon. When you install addons it sets them up as docker containers. Since I’m running in a VM it’ll all be contained in that Virtual machine. Also mosquito as a Home assistant addon integrates so you can use existing users and such. Hope that helps!

[@neilbrown3281]

@@geektoolkit certainly does help. I think I'll start again and install like you show, thanks for your efforts

[@geektoolkit]

No worries! If you hit any issues please create a new comment here and that’ll alert me and I can try to help out. I plan on making follow ups (takes me a bit to write and film). Next one will be ten addons I recommend and why, then from there I have tutorials on zwave and such in the home automation playlist

[@sanjubaba1978]

interesting video... I have installed the latest version of HA using docker image on Raspberry Pi3. after booting its prompt on ha>(black screen). how can I access the GUI on the same raspberry Pi3 so that I can access the browser and other utilities? Please suggest.

[@geektoolkit]

The GUI is web based. So you’d launch a browser and go to 127.0.0.1:8123 or localhost:8123 or similar. Theres no actual GUI outside of the web front end, but that is nice in that everything is consistent. If you access it remotely you can do everything that you can locally

[@toddwyche4653]

Great videos! I'm a new subscriber. Thank for you describing the various installation methods. I'm still a little unclear: What are the benefits of installing HA on a VM on Unraid vs installing the Home Assistant Docker that is available through the Unraid Community Applications? Also, if I have two always-on computers (one running Unraid and the other running Blue Iris/local A.I. computer vision on a Windows 10 Pro computer) would you suggest installing HA on a VM on the Unraid box or would you suggest installing HA on the Windows/Blue Iris box using Hyper-V (others seem to use Virtualbox to install HA and I'm still trying to figure out why they don't use Hyper-V)? (As far as my persona, I say I'm more of a technology enthusiast who is interested in tinkering with HA more as a fun life enhancer, definitely a GUI guy, values money more than time.)

[@geektoolkit]

Hi there, thankyou for subscribing and the kind message! As far as why virtualbox is so popular, I'm not sure. Maybe they're familiar with it at work, maybe the images provided work easier in it, I'm not sure. I'm normally a hyper-v person myself. re: Unraid docker app - Typically the docker apps are the 'core' version which doesn't give you the supervisor or addon store. The addon store is great because it handles setting up docker containers and connecting services automagically. If you're not a fan of doing a bunch of docker work and configs, then I'd say the addon store is worth it. I did a quick check and the home assistant that showed up in the app 'store' for me was just the core version. Re: Unraid vs. Hyper-V - This is a tough one. I find personally I treat my unraid box like a server..I don't touch it physically, I dont plug stuff into it, I don't reboot it, so I put HA on there to keep as much uptime as possible. My Win10 machine is my devbox, and anytime I'm futzing with it I'm rebooting or messing with stuff, so it's a bit less stable. It's also my gaming machine and a machine I want the most perf on, so taking resources out of it for a VM is less than ideal. So for me, I'd put it on the unraid box. You should be able to expose blue iris to it over your LAN. Hope that helps!

[@toddwyche4653]

@@geektoolkit Thanks for the quick reply. I ended up installing HA on a VM on Unraid. Now, I'm figuring out how to use ESPhome for my first sensor project. From my reading, it seems that Hyper-V does not allow USB devices (e.g. Zwave dongles) to be passed through, but Virtualbox does. That's probably why folks are using Virtualbox for this kind of step up. I'm looking forward to your next videos.

[@Nick-od9ln]

thanks for the video. my only issue with the vm installation is that rebooting home assistant takes forever atleast 15 minutes. however when i have home assistant installed on a old laptop the reboots are so much faster maybe 2-3 minutes. i am not sure if its because it is connected to a virtual switch then into the ethernet adapter. do u have this issue too??

[@geektoolkit]

I don’t. I see about 2-3 minute reboots on mine but I’m not sure where the issue would be there

[@gregtaylor5354]

Hi I’m new to setting up my connected house. All of my devices that I have so far are connected straight to my WiFi. Would it be better to get a hub to connect them?

[@geektoolkit]

Hubs are mainly for zwave and zigbee devices, or to offer you a home automation control center essentially. If you’re doing ok with how things are setup I wouldn’t worry about getting a hub unless you’re looking to get into smart things/home assistant or similar

[@gregtaylor5354]

Yes I want to install home assistant. I have been watching your videos. I have just got a raspberry pi 4 I’m having a go at loading the software today after I finish work.

[@gregtaylor5354]

So if I’m setting up home assistant then get one? Samsung smart things ok?

[@geektoolkit]

Oh!! No no Home Assistant would be the “hub” in that case. You shouldn’t need another hub if you’re using all wifi stuff. That’s the beauty of it. If you end up needing zwave or zigbee later you can get dongles (USB devices) for those. Thanks for the kinds words I think you’re about to have a fun journey!

[@pkaspa02]

Embarrassing noob question: do I flash to the internal SD card on the rPi board or to an SD card in a USB adapter that plugs into the rPi?

[@geektoolkit]

Any question is welcome here, this channel is to help others learn and experience the fun of tech! Initially you flash the image from a PC/MAC onto the micro sd card, and then plug that into the micro SD card slot on the raspberry pi. I'm not sure if that is what you're asking, but hopefully that helps, if not please let me know and I'll help you out as much as I can.

[@gregtaylor5354]

Hi Joe I have installed HA but I don’t have Hassio any idea why I wouldn’t have that?

[@geektoolkit]

Home assistant dropped Hassios name and now calls it supervisor in the UI. Do you have that part? Hoping so!

[@gregtaylor5354]

Oh yes I do thanks. Going to have a good go at setting it up next week. Studying the videos first. 🤞🏻🤞🏻

[@markgillman1002]

I setup the vm on Unraid as instructed but can not reach the new HA vm. The problem is the IP address of the VM is different prefix than my network IP address. My network IP's all have 192.168.68.xxx and the VM IP address is 192.168.122.166. Why would the 3rd set of numbers change in the IP address. I'm not able to reach this site for some reason. Any ideas what I did wrong?

[@geektoolkit]

I'm not sure what went wrong there, but I'd ask on the unraid forums...one of the reasons I like it is that they're very active and have usually replied quickly (I've also found 2 of my questions answered there by searching). That is an odd issue...my VM's use my same router for DHCP as everything else. Does your unraid server have the 122 or the 68 ip? If it has the 122, then I'd look upstream to see what is assigning IP addresses to it...do you have 2 routers, or a mesh network behind a router (That just happened to me..and the mesh network was also routing and assinging it's own IPs). Definitely ask on the unraid forums though, they'll be of more help!

[@markgillman1002]

@@geektoolkit Thanks for responding. I have an unraid box with 9drives but want to create a separate one using the Intel NUC you recommended. Is it possible to run Unraid with just 1 drive and not setup a parity drive and all the unraid stuff? I'm sure the NUC only has 1 drive so just want to make sure this works before I buy it.

[@geektoolkit]

I’m not sure if it can only use the internal drive. I use an 8tb external and don’t use the internal at all (or maybe it’s a cache I’ll have to check) I don’t have a parity drive at all and it works. I am looking to consolidate though and move to a microitx or similar to get back to internal drives (an external drive on a NUC with its additional power supply isn’t ideal.,.you end up with an extra power brick. ) That’s my thoughts. Oh also your setup sounds amazing :)

[@markgillman1002]

@@geektoolkit Thanks, this is helpful. I'm sure with the internal 240G or some other size SSD unraid should be able to just run with that one drive. I may get one and see if I can get unraid to work and then create the vm on that same drive. Sounds like you're not using unraid for storage. There's a whole world out there of ways to use unraid.

[@geektoolkit]

Right currently not for storage for me...but I want to :) 240 should be great...I only had 32 in mine which wasn’t near enough!

[@venkatesanmurugan3931]

hai, After the installation was error something went wrong loading onboarding. then the page was not opening try refreshing kindly provide the good solution

[@geektoolkit]

Can you share the full error text? Which install method did you use?

[@venkatesanmurugan3931]

@@geektoolkit Error: something went wrong loading onboarding. Usng Raspberry PI4

[@geektoolkit]

Did you use the official image off the site? Did it have internet when you booted it? I’d post on the forums for that one, they’ll be better at diagnosing and the devs can help. If I’ve seen a problem I can help but I’ve not seen that one. My guess is it could t get to the internet to update. I’d try to wire up the network till you get started

[@venkatesanmurugan3931]

@@geektoolkit Thanks for your quick response Yes official website download from HA. yes have internet after 20 min I facing this error. I connecting through WIFY

[@rrrrrrrr290]

dont you need to resize the QCOW file so HA can be bigger than 6g

[@geektoolkit]

Ah yes you’re right I missed that step! I set mine to 32 gigs.

[@mrbilky]

I noticed that on your VM screen your vdisk is only 6G mine is also but I have run into a problem where the disk is full and I can no longer add or install anything my HA instance is not nearly as large yet compared to others so the million dollar question is how do I enlarge the vdisk? I added an additional vdisk in the VM but it does not appear to resolve the issue ****SOLVED**** I never find an answer when I google something on the first go but here is the fix, open your terminal and paste this command line remember to change your disk size to what you like and if it means anything to you add 6G and the balance to arrive at the size you want also just make sure your path mapping and version number are correct and bingo resized Vdisk! sudo qemu-img resize /mnt/user/domains/hassos_ova-1.6.qcow2 +20G

[@geektoolkit]

Sorry I just saw this...I missed a step where you resize the drive...there’s a way to do it via the UI also. I’m working on a follow up (actually a whole series) and was going to stuff it into that

[@mrbilky]

@@geektoolkit Good deal so far this has been the best setup I've had running and super simple to install, I did the rpi thing, proxmox and virtual box but they were on another machine from my unRAID server. I tried the docker option in unRAID for HA but it was terrible with this setup it was super easy and its working extremely well now I can't believe that you seem to be the first to find this option and put it up on youtube thanks again this was great just subbed!

[@geektoolkit]

Yay!! Glad it helped! I think digiblur may have documented it on his channel, but the thing I’m finding is that over time there’s SO many videos out there it’s tough to find a series. So I’m hoping a series that is dedicated helps. The home automation playlist is the start of that, but I want it to be step by step in a way. Thanks for the subscription and supporting the channel I really appreciate that!

[@mrbilky]

@@geektoolkit Yep I followed Travis but it was experimental and very unstable I think he moved on from it as its not on his github anymore

[@rrrrrrrr290]

I was running HA in unraid docker, moved over to proxmox, but still use and love unraid use unraid for plex etc and send my HA backups to unraid

[@geektoolkit]

I tried proxmox and honestly my Linux skills just weren’t up to the task. Dr zzs has excellent videos on it. I felt like I was running scripts to setup things that I didn’t understand and that made me think “if this breaks I won’t know where to begin to fix it”. I do like it, and if it I get better at Linux I hope to set it up. Till then unraids doing well. I LOVE that there are a number of quality solutions though! That speaks highly of the ecosystem. :)

[@rrrrrrrr290]

@@geektoolkit did you mention the free trial period for unraid so people can check it out without paying

[@geektoolkit]

I don’t think I did, I’ll have to add it to the description. That’s a good point!

[@rrrrrrrr290]

@@geektoolkit its like going to bunnings, always forget something

[@RicardoMaranhaoMD]

perfect! really want to see how to configure all addons, https, wihtin vm under unraid! thanks my friend! nice tutorial

[@geektoolkit]

That’s my plan! This will be part one of several. I have some addons in the Home automation playlist to help you get started, but I’d like to update some of them

[@RoyD2]

Actually the Hyper-V Hypervisor is free. It will only cost you money if you decide to run Windows OS on the vm's. Basically you could run Hyper-V as a hypervisor and run Linux on it. The Evaluation Edition has no time limited on it: www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019

[@geektoolkit]

OMG I wasn’t aware of the free version, you’re absolutely right!! I’ll get the description updated and give it a shot soon. Thankyou!

[@RoyD2]

@@geektoolkit Licensing of any company is usually hard to get a wrap on. Anyway really appreciating these videos, you have a clear and complete way of explaining things. The're really useful.

[@geektoolkit]

@@RoyD2 Thankyou!! I'm going to try to do a series for Home Assistant. I've seen alot of people do one off videos, but I thought maybe I can do a 'start here, then do this, then do this' style. I probably wont redo the stuff I"ve covered, but there's plenty more that's still not documented or updated for the 'new' way of doing stuff. I put alot of time into the videos so I really appreciate the feedback and kind words! Makes it worth it :D

[@RoyD2]

@@geektoolkit Sounds good to me! A fresh from start till end playlist would be great. There are loads of series but I didn't found an in-depth start to end video. Your playlist is the closest I got up to it till now. Keep up the good work, I will receive my new RaspB in the next few weeks and follow along as you proceed in the series.

[@RoyD2]

TBH I think most people will be fine with below 1000 IOPS. Working for an IT vendor I rarely see above 4K IOPS even for Office automation.. Should be fine with lower IOPS for what this does.

[@geektoolkit]

Good point...things go so fast these days that sometimes there is 'works great' and 'works better' options. I've seen a lot of posts on the home assistant groups on facebook of people mentioning better reboot times and overall 'snappiness' with the SSDs, but really the best thing is just the reliability boost. I had an SD card go bad after a year and I didn't have any backups..and that was brutal. But yeah, the IOPS on the microSD isn't unusable

[@RoyD2]

@@geektoolkit You are right. SD card will be much more unstable and have the chance to fail. Must say though, just booted Pi4 2GB with A1 SD card and its running great.

[@AlexManMe]

Here from FB 👍

[@geektoolkit]

Yay welcome!!

[@RoyD2]

Great video again! Playing sea of thieves? Whats that username:)?

[@geektoolkit]

How did you find this one it’s not even published yet lol!!! I haven’t had a chance to review it. The browser starts with the Thankyou!! Xbox plugin so it likely shows games I’m not yet playing. My GT is Darthsnoopy but I haven’t been on for a bit (making videos and my daughter takes up my time! (But I love it)

[@RoyD2]

@@geektoolkit I just found your page today and was checking videos from the playlist. Wasn't listed but probably was on the playlist haha.Haven't been on for a while either but Winter is Coming...

[@geektoolkit]

@@RoyD2 Oh you're totally right, I was doing the behind the scene prep work and added it to the playlist. Whew, I thought I mistakenly published it! I haven't watched it yet, I like to give them a once over to make sure I didn't screw something up. And yeah, winter is indeed coming! Hoping to get some time on soon. I just got the battletoads remake I want to try!

[@magicmedia7950]

What is home assistant!!!???

[@geektoolkit]

Home assistant is an open source home automation platform