Home Assistant

Home Assistant is an open source home automation software that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.

Home Assistant with nginx as a reverse proxy

If you run a public Home Assistant instance it is a good idea to enable SSL/TLS. The following configuration generates a certificate using letsencrypt:

  services.home-assistant.config
    server_host = "::1";
    trusted_proxies = [ "::1" ];
    use_x_forwarded_for = true;
  };

  services.nginx = {
    recommendedProxySettings = true;
    virtualHosts."home.example.com" = {
      forceSSL = true;
      enableACME = true;
      extraConfig = ''
        proxy_buffering off;
      '';
      locations."/" = {
        proxyPass = "http://[::1]:8123";
        proxyWebsockets = true;
      };
    };
  };

Adding postgresql support

Home-assistant supports PostgreSQL as a database backend for, among other things, its logger and history components. It's a lot more scalable and typically provides faster response times than the SQLite database, that is used by default.

Remember to make backups of your database, for home-assistant is becoming more and more stateful and has moved away from a completely declarative YAML configuration for new and core components.

  services.home-assistant = {
    package = (pkgs.home-assistant.override {
      extraPackages = py: with py; [ psycopg2 ];
    });
    config.recorder.db_url = "postgresql://@/hass";
  };

  services.postgresql = {
    enable = true;
    ensureDatabases = [ "hass" ];
    ensureUsers = [{
      name = "hass";
      ensurePermissions = {
        "DATABASE hass" = "ALL PRIVILEGES";
      };
    }];
  };

Run home-assistant from github repository

When developing home-assistant for some test dependencies additional libraries are needed. A nix-shell expression for this is available here.

Add custom lovelace modules

This pull request describes how to add custom lovelace modules.

Add custom components

In order to install a custom component, you have to place it in /var/lib/hass/custom_components. This can be achieved using systemd tmpfiles like so (for sonoff custom component):

  systemd.tmpfiles.rules = [
    "C /var/lib/hass/custom_components/sonoff - - - - ${sources.sonoff-lan}/custom_components/sonoff"
    "Z /var/lib/hass/custom_components 770 hass hass - -"
  ];

Example configurations

- Mic92's config

- Balsoft's config