this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I own a couple TP-Link Tapo Wi-fi light bulbs. Currently, each family member installs an app on the phone to control the light bulbs. I wonder if there's a way to do the same but in a browser (via docker app on my NAS). And because we may use smart devices of other brands in the future, it seems too much trouble to install yet another app on each phone.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 8 months ago

HomeAssistant?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's what home assistant is built to do. There is a docker version, but I hit limits pretty quick and fired up an old raspberry pi running HomeassistantOS

One app, many devices & brands, custom interfaces for each member.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It was many, many years ago, but if I recall some of the add-ons or installations didn't work in the docker version. I started with docker on a Synology server, but I gave up on the whole project for a year until I found a Pi in a drawer I forgot I had.

HAOS just feels more "complete" to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Addons on HAOS are just Docker containers. When you use HA in Docker you have to just install the addons you like yourself as containers next to HA. It gives you more freedom to change settings for the "addons" when you install them yourself, but it is also a little more work. I think it is still worth it because you can also just install whatever you want. I run a minecraft server for example on the same server.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Haha! I feel like I got a little roasted and have some learning to do, but this hobby is all good fun.

I'm definitely not hating on docker. I use it for dozens of containers across several machines and love how easy it is, and even some of the fights we've had. If that works for people's needs, awesome!

I really wish I remembered what the error was. It's been bugging me all day. Maybe it's not a thing anymore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Nginx Proxy Manager is for scrubs, anyone who doesn't code their confs by hand is subhuman!

/s

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you have anything more to back up the claims about haos breaking privacy other than sone DNS queries? Just because there is a DNS query doesn't mean any actual data is being sent. I'm only asking because I'd be sad to hear if there are really issues. HA is fully open source so I'm surprised if this is really and issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Can you link me to an example or show me an example docker compose yml that adds an addon? I currently run a script that manually installs all my addons to the docker container by copying. Maybe you can show me with this: https://github.com/danielperna84/custom_homematic or any other really.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

My best advice is to NOT think of it as addons. If you want grafana or node red for example, just install them in seperate in a container not considering anything else about HA. Then just use them normally. You can still use the integrations for grafana and node red. Integrations work perfectly fine on HA in a Docker container.

Remember, very important: INTEGRATIONS ARE NOT ADDONS they are two very different things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ah. I'm running HA out of docker currently and haven't hit any walls, but I'm not exactly pushing it. There's an annoyance where I have to tell HA to trust my docker's default IP, and there was some reverse-proxy messing around I had to do to get it working on my network. Once it's up and loaded, it's indistinguishably HomeAssistant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I run mine behind a reverse proxy too and had to do that as well. Seems like a common thing there should be a system config for.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago

HomeAssistant and PiHole are the gateway drugs to selfhosting.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

Home Assistant

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Home Assistant!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I use Home Assistant for controlling my smart lights. They do support Docker, but I installed it as a VM with KVM. You get more features with it, such as add-ons. But you should definitely look into your options. They have a diagram on this page.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

To be fair, the add-ons are just containers installed and managed by HA. In most cases, you can install all of them as separate containers via something like Docker, but configuration takes more steps (though you also get more control).

Example: I have HA, Eclipse mosquitto, zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui, node-red, Grafana, and influxdb all running as docker containers on two different devices (my main HA host wasn't ideal for Zigbee and zwave USB dongles, so those are on a Pi 4). The other containers are accessible separately or from within HA as iFrame panels.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you (and the people who want to use these things) are on iOS, you could consider Homebridge

It is easier than a full home assistant install, and may be sufficient for what you want to do.

Home assistant might be overkill for your application (but it can do a lot more stuff)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I started on home assistant with just a couple Smart bulbs and oh boy has it gotten out of hand since then lol. Home bridge sounds good if that's all that's needed though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Its so weirdly addictive, started with proxmox, then to home assistant, now I have frigate handling PoE cameras, every bedroom has a morning alarm light automation, the vacuum starts itself, its ridiculous

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I don't know if tapo plugs are supported, but this git code lets you turn tplink kasa plugs into local server activated plugs so you don't have to use tplink app for activation online. Then homeassistant is a great tool for control

https://github.com/jkbenaim/hs100

Also worked on dimmable switches

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
IP Internet Protocol
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
PoE Power over Ethernet
Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

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