Okay, let me start by saying that I really do love Home Assistant. I believe that it is a fantastic piece of software, with very dedicated developers that are far more talented than I. Although, that being said, I strongly disagree with a number of their design choices.

My most recent problem has been trying to put Home Assistant behind a reverse proxy with a subpath. The Home Assistant developers flat out refuse any contribution that adds support for this. Supposedly, the frontend has hard-coded paths for some views, to me this doesn’t sound like a good practice to begin with – that being said, I mostly program in Go these days (so I’m unsure if this is something that is pretty common in some frameworks or languages). The official solution is to use a subdomain, which I can’t do – I’m trying to route all services through a Tailscale Funnel (which only provides a single domain; I doubt that Tailscale Funnels where ever designed for this purpose, but I’m trying to completely remove Cloudflare Tunnels for my selfhosted services).

The other major problem I’ve ran into, is that HAOS assumes that you would have no need to run any other Docker services other than those that are add-ons or Home Assistant itself. Which, I’m sorry (not really), Home Assistant add-ons are an absolute pain to deal with! Sure, when they work, they’re supper simple, but having to write an add-on for whenever I just want to spin up a single Docker container is not going to work for me.

Now, some smaller issues I’ve had:

  • There’s no way to change the default authentication providers. I host for my (non-techie) family, they’re not going to know what the difference between local authentication and command-line authentication is, just that one works and the other doesn’t.
  • Everything that is “advanced” requires a workaround. Like mounting external hard drives and sharing it with containers in HAOS requires you to setup the Samba add-on, add the network drive, and then you can use it within containers.

Again, I still really love Home Assistant, it’s just getting to a point where things are starting to feel hacky or not thought out all the way. I’ve considered other self-hosted automation software, but there really isn’t any other good alternative (unless you want to be using HomeKit). Also, I’m a programmer first, and far away from being a self-hosting pro (so let me know if I’ve missed any crucial details that completely flip my perspective on it’s head).

If you got to the end of this thanks for reading my rant, you’re awesome.

  • Norgur
    4•9 months ago

    I’m always very wary of systems that require a user to deviate as much from the “usual” structure almost all other services use. HAOS has really weird configs and “all the functionality” that presumably breaks when you use docker and don’t have the supervisor for docker… well… If what HA did was the way to go… whi is it that tons of services use docker’s rather powerful internal networking features just fine but HA of all things can’t do that and requires weird addons that for some reason cannot live on any other system than a Debian with weirdly specific modifications (bye bye cgroupsv2)? This will break most other functionality of that host Debian. I mean… if only there was a widespread-way to provide a highly customized Linux kernel in an ephemeral environment that can just be plugged in and out of a host machine without changing the host machine itself… Nah, can’t have that, let’s cause more overhead with a VM…

    I’m not willing to make that kind of modifications to my whole setup just for HA and in the long run, this rift between “the way it’s usually done” and “The HA-Way” will become bigger and bigger, causing more and more problems.