I love Home Assistant, but...

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.

oldfart ,

I second the complaint about subpaths. I have all my services on a single domain, except for HA. It's for security by obscurity, when you issue a certificate for a subdomain you start getting malicious traffic probing for vulnerabilities almost immediately. I don't have this problems for services with non-obvious subpaths.

I can't understand the stubbornness of developers to accept patches for fixing this problem.

Heavybell ,
@Heavybell@lemmy.world avatar

LetsEncrypt can hand out wildcard certs if you are able to add TXT records to your domain, if that helps any.

I realised this was a stupid comment that doesn't help any.

oldfart ,

No no, that's how i'm working around the problem now, but i'm sure sni sniffing will sooner or later make my domain well known

mhzawadi ,

I think your missing the point of HAOS, it's an appliance. You don't manage it like a normal self host system.

Once you treat it as an appliance, it's great. Also there is a portainer agent you can run that will connect to a portainer instance.

As for your tunnel issues, maybe the tunnel thing is your biggest issue. I run all my self host stuff on its own subdomain, if I want to route something home I use the site to site VPN I have. Even a cheap ovh vps could be a way to run stuff on subdomains

Shimitar ,
@Shimitar@feddit.it avatar

Require a subdinain should not be mandatory in 2024.

Sub paths should be such a basic feature that's ridiculous devs don't even take that into consideration.

Why? Because a software requiring absolute paths is as old and obsolete as an msdos program, and the only real reason it happens today is... Bad design choices or limited frameworks.

hedgehog ,

Have you considered not using the Home Assistant OS? You don’t need to run it to use Home Assistant. You can instead set your host up with some other OS, like Debian, and then run Home Assistant in a docker container (or containers, plural) and run any other containers you want.

I’m not doing this myself so can’t speak to its limitations, but from what I’ve heard, if you’re familiar with Docker then it’s pretty straightforward.

A lot of apps use hard coded paths, so using a subdomain per app makes it much easier to use them all. Traefik has middleware, including stripPrefix, which allow you to strip a path prefix before forwarding the path to the app, though - have you tried that approach?

MaggiWuerze ,

You can't use add-ons when running HA as a docker container, which basically lobotomizes it.

infeeeee ,

Addons are just other containers, you can run them next to ha

Maximilious ,
@Maximilious@kbin.social avatar

Yes you can. It requires those docker containers to be installed and plugged into it on a stand alone system. This is exactly what HAOS is doing behind the scenes for is users and why many stick with it.

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