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Home Assistant

Home Assistant is a home automation platform written in Python, with extensive support for 3rd-party home-automation platforms including Xaomi, Phillips Hue, and a bazillion others.

Home Assistant Screenshot

This recipe combines the extensibility of Home Assistant with the flexibility of InfluxDB (for time series data store) and Grafana (for beautiful visualisation of that data).

Home Assistant Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Related:

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need several directories to bind-mount into our container, so create them in /var/data/homeassistant:

mkdir /var/data/homeassistant
cd /var/data/homeassistant
mkdir -p {homeassistant,grafana,influxdb-backup}

Now create a directory for the influxdb realtime data:

mkdir /var/data/runtime/homeassistant/influxdb

Prepare Home Assistant environment

Create /var/data/config/homeassistant/grafana.env, and populate with the following - this is to enable grafana to work with oauth2_proxy without requiring an additional level of authentication:

GF_AUTH_BASIC_ENABLED=false

Home Assistant Docker Swarm config

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

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version: "3"

services:
    influxdb:
      image: influxdb
      networks:
        - internal
      volumes:
        - /var/data/runtime/homeassistant/influxdb:/var/lib/influxdb
        - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

    homeassistant:
      image: homeassistant/home-assistant
      dns_search: hq.example.com
      volumes:
        - /var/data/homeassistant/homeassistant:/config
        - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      deploy:
        labels:
          # traefik common
          - traefik.enable=true
          - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

          # traefikv1
          - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:homeassistant.example.com
          - traefik.port=8123     

          # traefikv2
          - "traefik.http.routers.homeassistant.rule=Host(`homeassistant.example.com`)"
          - "traefik.http.services.homeassistant.loadbalancer.server.port=8123"
          - "traefik.enable=true"
      networks:
        - traefik_public
        - internal
      ports:
        - 8123:8123

    grafana-app:
      image: grafana/grafana
      env_file : /var/data/config/homeassistant/grafana.env
      volumes:
        - /var/data/homeassistant/grafana:/var/lib/grafana
        - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      networks:
        - internal
        - traefik_public
      deploy:
        labels:
          # traefik common
          - traefik.enable=true
          - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

          # traefikv1
          - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:grafana.example.com
          - traefik.port=3000     

          # traefikv2
          - "traefik.http.routers.grafana.rule=Host(`grafana.example.com`)"
          - "traefik.http.services.grafana.loadbalancer.server.port=3000"
          - "traefik.enable=true"

          # Remove if you wish to access the URL directly
          - "traefik.http.routers.grafana.middlewares=forward-auth@file"

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true
  internal:
    driver: overlay
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 172.16.13.0/24

Note

Setup unique static subnets for every stack you deploy. This avoids IP/gateway conflicts which can otherwise occur when you're creating/removing stacks a lot. See my list here.

Serving

Launch Home Assistant stack

Launch the Home Assistant stack by running docker stack deploy homeassistant -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Log into your new instance at https://YOUR-FQDN, the password you created in configuration.yml as "frontend - api_key". Then setup a bunch of sensors, and log into https://grafana.YOUR FQDN and create some beautiful graphs :)

Chef's notes 📓

  1. I tried to protect Home Assistant using oauth2_proxy, but HA is incompatible with the websockets implementation used by Home Assistant. Until this can be fixed, I suggest that geeks set frontend: api_key to a long and complex string, and rely on this to prevent malevolent internet miscreants from turning their lights on at 2am! ↩

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