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.

  • Nyfure
    3•10 months ago

    As far as i understood tailscale funnel its just a TCP-tunnel.
    So you handle TLS on your own system, which makes sure tailscale cannot really interfere.

    If you already trust them this far, might aswell do the same with a VPS and gain much more flexibility and independence (you can easily switch VPS provider, you cannot really switch tailscale funnel provider, you vendor-locked yourself in that regard)

    I’d connect the VPS and your home system via VPN (you can probably also use tailscale for this) and then you can use a tcp-tunnel (e.g. haproxy), or straight up forward the whole traffic via firewall-rules (a bit more tricky, but more flexible… though not that easy with tailscale… probably best to use TCP-tunnel with PROXY-Protocol).
    This way you can use all ports, all protocols, incoming and outgoing traffic with the IP-Address of the VPS.

    Tailscale might even already have something that can configure this for you… but i dont really know tailscale, so idk…

    And as you terminate TLS on your home-system, traffic flowing through the VPS is always encrypted.

    If you want to go overboard, you can block attackers on the server before it even hits your home-system (i think crowdsec can do it, the detector runs on your home-system and detects attacks and can issue bans which blocks the attacker on the VPS)

    And yes, its a bit paranoid… but its your choice.
    My internet connection here isnt good enough to do major stuff like what i am doing (handling media, backups and other data) so i rent some dedicated machines (okay, i guess a bit more secure than a VPS, but in the end its not 100% in your control either)