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’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.
Many systems dont support subpaths as it can cause some really weird problems.
As you use tailscale funnels, you really want incoming traffic from the internet. I am not sure thats a good idea for e.g. homeassistant that is limited in access anyways.
Might aswell use tailscale and access the system over VPN.
And for anything serious i wouldnt use something like funnel anyways. Rent a VPS and use that as your reverse-proxy, you can then also do some caching or host some services there. Much simpler to deal with and full support for such things as you then have an actual public IPv4/IPv6 address to use.
Heck, dont even have to pay for it with the Oracle Always-Free system.
I largely agree with this, but (and this might be me being a little paranoid) I don’t really trust anyone to handle my data like that. I self-host as much as possible to get away from things beyond my control, I understand that this is an extremist view of things, but the only reason why I use Tailscale Funnel is because the family would either not know how to, or not want, to deal with a VPN like that.
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)
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”
Seems like you have some limitation (I really don’t know tailscail funnel) in your setup, and now you expect them to work around it.
Sub-paths are actually a fairly requested feature for Home Assistant. Although, they have a limitation of hard-coded paths, which they now expect us to work around. I’m actually fairly okay with that, they’re programmers who (a number of) work for free, with the exception of the few apart of Nabu Casa, and they’ve already exceeded my personal expectations it’s not like I deserve any features, but they also don’t deserve me to love 100% of their design decisions.
Yes, HAOS is great when you have one dedicated machine for it, for example a RPi. That’s the whole purpose of HAOS, as far as I understand.
I’ve admitted this already, but I seem to have totally miscalculated the ability of HAOS add-ons, and treated them like traditional Docker containers. This was my bad, and I learned the hard way, but at least now I know.
If you already have a zoo full of docker containers, then you want your Home Assistant (without HAOS) in just one more of your own containers.
I’m far from a zoo keeper. Once I setup everything on RPi OS again I’ll have just a few things for media (Jellyfin and a fork of Gonic, at least until my PR gets merged), Vaultwarden, and a home automation service (which may or may not be Home Assistant – if I can figure out a decent way of exposing it) I less services being hosted when I was on HAOS.
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.
With the caveat that I can tell just from your post that I certainly know way less about this stuff than you do, HAOS’ assumption seems pretty reasonable to me. Isn’t the point of using HAOS (as opposed to installing HA some other way) that you’d be either (a) using it by itself on bare-metal hardware, or (b) using it in a VM? I’m running HAOS and Docker in two different VMs on Proxmox, and it’s working fine for me so far.
(The first complaint you mentioned, about reverse proxies and subpaths, sounds a lot more legitimate. In fact, that’s something I’d like to learn more about because I haven’t yet figured out how to make my HA install – or anything, for that matter – accessible outside my LAN and “Tailscale Funnel” sounds intriguing.)
I’m running HAOS and Docker in two different VMs on Proxmox, and it’s working fine for me so far.
So, I think I’ve mentioned this in another reply, but, I have a very minimal setup. It’s a RPi4 as the main device, Starlink as the ISP (CGNAT; no port-forwarding), and now Tailscale as the only way to access outside of my LAN. I agree that HAOS meets it’s primary job of running Home Assistant. Although, I don’t have the option to run Proxmox (at least I’ve never seen anyone run Proxmox on an RPi) and also have a massive music library (and soon a large movie and TV show collection, once I rip all of those DVDs) so I really only need to run a few things:
A dashboard to make accessing the services easier for the family.
A reverse proxy to handle subpaths (this used to be Cloudflare Tunnels with subdomains and NPM with subpaths, now it’s just Nginx).
Tailscale (to expose services and run a VPN to get past the CGNAT).
Jellyfin (for TV shows and movies).
A forked version of Goinc (I have a fork with LDAP support, there’s an open pull request for it, but it needs a little extra work; this wasn’t ran on HA).
Something to run LDAP authentication.
Some Home Automation software (was Home Assistant, I migth switch to something else).
Edit: I also run Vaultwarden.
I’ve really scaled things back since previous self-hosting journeys, and when I first started with HAOS there was even less going on, and really I need things to just work. I’m learning now that my mistake was assuming that HAOS add-ons are supposed to behave just like a Docker container, they’re not. I’ve learned the hard way, but, I still don’t love HA’s attitude towards something that are deemed “complex,” such as sub-paths and alternative authentication providers.
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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.
Many systems dont support subpaths as it can cause some really weird problems.
As you use tailscale funnels, you really want incoming traffic from the internet. I am not sure thats a good idea for e.g. homeassistant that is limited in access anyways.
Might aswell use tailscale and access the system over VPN.
And for anything serious i wouldnt use something like funnel anyways. Rent a VPS and use that as your reverse-proxy, you can then also do some caching or host some services there. Much simpler to deal with and full support for such things as you then have an actual public IPv4/IPv6 address to use.
Heck, dont even have to pay for it with the Oracle Always-Free system.
I largely agree with this, but (and this might be me being a little paranoid) I don’t really trust anyone to handle my data like that. I self-host as much as possible to get away from things beyond my control, I understand that this is an extremist view of things, but the only reason why I use Tailscale Funnel is because the family would either not know how to, or not want, to deal with a VPN like that.
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)
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”
Seems like you have some limitation (I really don’t know tailscail funnel) in your setup, and now you expect them to work around it.
Yes, HAOS is great when you have one dedicated machine for it, for example a RPi. That’s the whole purpose of HAOS, as far as I understand.
If you already have a zoo full of docker containers, then you want your Home Assistant (without HAOS) in just one more of your own containers.
Sub-paths are actually a fairly requested feature for Home Assistant. Although, they have a limitation of hard-coded paths, which they now expect us to work around. I’m actually fairly okay with that, they’re programmers who (a number of) work for free, with the exception of the few apart of Nabu Casa, and they’ve already exceeded my personal expectations it’s not like I deserve any features, but they also don’t deserve me to love 100% of their design decisions.
I’ve admitted this already, but I seem to have totally miscalculated the ability of HAOS add-ons, and treated them like traditional Docker containers. This was my bad, and I learned the hard way, but at least now I know.
I’m far from a zoo keeper. Once I setup everything on RPi OS again I’ll have just a few things for media (Jellyfin and a fork of Gonic, at least until my PR gets merged), Vaultwarden, and a home automation service (which may or may not be Home Assistant – if I can figure out a decent way of exposing it) I less services being hosted when I was on HAOS.
With the caveat that I can tell just from your post that I certainly know way less about this stuff than you do, HAOS’ assumption seems pretty reasonable to me. Isn’t the point of using HAOS (as opposed to installing HA some other way) that you’d be either (a) using it by itself on bare-metal hardware, or (b) using it in a VM? I’m running HAOS and Docker in two different VMs on Proxmox, and it’s working fine for me so far.
(The first complaint you mentioned, about reverse proxies and subpaths, sounds a lot more legitimate. In fact, that’s something I’d like to learn more about because I haven’t yet figured out how to make my HA install – or anything, for that matter – accessible outside my LAN and “Tailscale Funnel” sounds intriguing.)
So, I think I’ve mentioned this in another reply, but, I have a very minimal setup. It’s a RPi4 as the main device, Starlink as the ISP (CGNAT; no port-forwarding), and now Tailscale as the only way to access outside of my LAN. I agree that HAOS meets it’s primary job of running Home Assistant. Although, I don’t have the option to run Proxmox (at least I’ve never seen anyone run Proxmox on an RPi) and also have a massive music library (and soon a large movie and TV show collection, once I rip all of those DVDs) so I really only need to run a few things:
Edit: I also run Vaultwarden.
I’ve really scaled things back since previous self-hosting journeys, and when I first started with HAOS there was even less going on, and really I need things to just work. I’m learning now that my mistake was assuming that HAOS add-ons are supposed to behave just like a Docker container, they’re not. I’ve learned the hard way, but, I still don’t love HA’s attitude towards something that are deemed “complex,” such as sub-paths and alternative authentication providers.
I’m on RPi OS now.
Caddy and Rewrite / strip_prefix doesn’t work?
reverse Proxy based on the /homass and then internally strip the prefix from /homass/x to just /x ?