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.
I will first admit that I am quite ignorant to Home Assistant.
I am a happy openHAB user for 5+ years. Have you considered switching to see if you like it?
I tried Home Assistant once or twice but never felt comfortable enough to switch.
I run stuff locally and can connect over VPN to my home and operate as if I am inside the home. I have not looked into these other cloudflare tunnels or tail scale as I don’t think it would provide any advantage to my current setup.
OpenVPN server running on my router does the trick.
I am a happy openHAB user for 5+ years. Have you considered switching to see if you like it?
I actually have considered it, and I’m still thinking about it.
I run stuff locally and can connect over VPN to my home and operate as if I am inside the home. I have not looked into these other cloudflare tunnels or tail scale as I don’t think it would provide any advantage to my current setup.
I have a strange setup. My ISP is Starlink (so I’m behind a CGNAT), meaning I kinda need another service to access them outside the network, but (as mentioned) I mainly host for my family who wouldn’t know how to work another app or VPN.
I had to look that up. So ya, I understand your problem a bit better. Wish I could offer some solutions.
For anyone interested…
“Starlink uses Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) to avoid the need for 1,000s of IPv4 addresses, which can be a problem for some users due to how they are using Starlink. However, some VPN services like PureVPN can be used to bypass CGNAT restrictions on Port Forwarding.1 CGNAT prevents direct access to the Starlink antenna from the internet, making setting up a VPN or hosting services challenging. There is no direct public IP address assigned to the Starlink antenna, which hinders traditional methods of setting up a VPN server or hosting services like port forwarding and DMZ access”
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
I will first admit that I am quite ignorant to Home Assistant.
I am a happy openHAB user for 5+ years. Have you considered switching to see if you like it?
I tried Home Assistant once or twice but never felt comfortable enough to switch.
I run stuff locally and can connect over VPN to my home and operate as if I am inside the home. I have not looked into these other cloudflare tunnels or tail scale as I don’t think it would provide any advantage to my current setup.
OpenVPN server running on my router does the trick.
I actually have considered it, and I’m still thinking about it.
I have a strange setup. My ISP is Starlink (so I’m behind a CGNAT), meaning I kinda need another service to access them outside the network, but (as mentioned) I mainly host for my family who wouldn’t know how to work another app or VPN.
I had to look that up. So ya, I understand your problem a bit better. Wish I could offer some solutions.
For anyone interested…
“Starlink uses Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) to avoid the need for 1,000s of IPv4 addresses, which can be a problem for some users due to how they are using Starlink. However, some VPN services like PureVPN can be used to bypass CGNAT restrictions on Port Forwarding.1 CGNAT prevents direct access to the Starlink antenna from the internet, making setting up a VPN or hosting services challenging. There is no direct public IP address assigned to the Starlink antenna, which hinders traditional methods of setting up a VPN server or hosting services like port forwarding and DMZ access”