Self-Hosting Guide: Home Assistant

1. Overview

I've used Home Assistant off and on for years, but I've never written a guide on it because it always felt like a half-baked solution with my combinations of products and my Home Assistant configuration.

However, Home Assistant looks much better these days and now has native UniFi Protect support, so I decided to switch back to using it full time and writing up a proper guide to installing, configuring, and customizing the software.

2. Installation

I happened to have a spare Raspberry Pi 4 sitting around I wasn't using, so I opted for the Raspberry Pi installation tutorial from Home Assistant. This tutorial guides you through the flashing of Home Assistant OS to an SD card and initialization of the software.

This process is seamless and will result in a ready-to-use device with Home Assistant.

3. Configuration

Once the device is ready, all you need to do is create your account and complete the initial setup wizard within the Home Assistant page (e.g., homeassistant.local:8123).

At this point, you will have a functioning Home Assistant deployment. However, I want to go further and configure the service to use my personal devices and display information via customized interfaces.

To start with our configuration, we will visit the Settings > Devices & services page. This page will display all currently configured integrations, as well as automatically discovered integrations that you can configure.

3.1. HACS

Another integration of note is the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS), which provides a familiar integration into the Home Assistant UI that allows you to manage custom elements.

If you installed Home Assistant like I did using the OS method, you will need to install the Get-HACS integration to install HACS and then restart Home Assistant to start utilizing these custom elements.

Personally, I am using HACS in order to utilize the Hatch Rest integration for my Hatch Rest Mini, Rest+, and Restore.

You can see it here in my Media dashboard:

Once you have installed all relevant integrations and synced your devices to Home Assistant, you are ready to build your dashboards.

3.2. External Access

If you want to be able to external your instance externally, you will need to expose the service to the internet somehow. One option is a reverse proxy, such as Nginx, which I have covered in numerous self-hosting posts. Another option is Cloudflare Tunnels, which I will cover here.

Configuring a tunnel to Home Assistant OS takes a few more steps than a normal reverse proxy, but I currently find the security benefits worthwhile.

To start, install the app-cloudflared app in the Add-ons menu within Home Assistant.

Once installed, follow the instructions to configure the External Home Assistant Hostname, Cloudflare Tunnel Name, and the Cloudflare Tunnel Token within the Configuration tab of the installed add-on. Once configured, I restarted Home Assistant to start fresh.

Next, I opened Cloudflare and configured the tunnel to expose the ha.example.com domain to the homeassistant.local:8123 address in Cloudflare's Zero Trust dashboard.

From here, I can access Home Assistant anywhere I go from the ha.example.com domain.

4. Customization

Finally, let's customize our dashboards. The view below is my standard view when greeted by my dashboard.

As you can see, I choose to keep general information in the main tab, such as weather, time, and location. Instead of jamming every widget into a single tab, I separate my tabs by function:

• Media: TVs, Speakers, and other playable entities
• Cameras: UniFi Protect cameras
• Lights: Hue bulbs and other lighting systems
• IoT: Other miscellaneous devices, such as printers, my Litter Robot, Roomba, etc.

When editing a dashboard, you're presented with a myriad of options. First, you can choose to use a number of layout options (sections, masonry, sidebar, and single card). Next, each element you add to the dashboard any number of entities, names, themes, states, and more to configure.

Honestly, I had forgotten how customizable these dashboards were and I will absolutely spend a lot of time customizing for very specific needs.

See below for some examples of editing and IoT elements:

Once you have configured and customized your dashboards to your heart's content, you're reading to start automating and more! I highly suggest browsing the web and Home Assistant forums for ideas and solutions that fit your needs. There are more possibilities to this platform than you'll likely ever be able to use.

4.1. Mobile View

Before I finish this post, I wanted to show how reliable the mobile view of the platform displays. These screenshots were captured on the iOS Home Assistant app, using the remote URL for my instance.

Dashboard	Entity

...or, comment on this post on Bubbles!