Home Assistant

Getting Started

Preparation

Installing and running Home Assistant on your local machine is easy. Make sure you have Python 3.4 installed and execute the following code in a console:

The preparation of a Fedora 22 host will only take a couple of minutes. First install Python 3.4 and the other needed packages out of the Fedora Package Collection. This ensure that you receive updates in the future.

It’s assumed that your user has an entry in the sudoers file. Otherwise, run the commands which needs more privileges as root. 

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sudo dnf -y install python3 python3-devel gcc

CentOS is providing longtime support and often not shipping the latest release of a software component. To run, Python 3.x on CentOS Software Collections needs to be activated.

Step 1. Install the tools for the Software Collection
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sudo yum -y install scl-utils
Step 2. Make the repository available.
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sudo yum -y install https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-python34/epel-7-x86_64/download/rhscl-rh-python34-epel-7-x86_64.noarch.rpm
Step 3. Install Python 3.x
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sudo yum -y install rh-python34
Step 4. Start using software collections:
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scl enable rh-python34 bash

Installation

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pip3 install homeassistant
hass --open-ui

Running these commands will:

  1. Install Home Assistant
  2. Launch Home Assistant and serve web interface on http://localhost:8123

Post-Installation

There is nothing else to do. If you run into any issues, please see the troubleshooting page.

If you want to see what Home Assistant can do, you can start the demo mode by running hass --demo-mode.

In the future, if you want to update to the latest version, run pip3 install --upgrade home-assistant.

By default, the access to port 8123 is not allowed. If you want to allow other hosts in your local network access, open port 8123.

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sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8123/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Home Assistant will serve its web interface on http://[IP address of the host]:8123.

If you want that Home Assistant is lauched automatically, an extra step is needed to setup systemd. You need a service file to control Home Assistant with systemd. 

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su -c 'cat <<EOF >> /lib/systemd/system/home-assistant.service
[Unit]
Description=Home Assistant
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3.4 -m homeassistant

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF'

You need to reload systemd to make the daemon aware of the new configuration. Enable and launch Home Assistant after that.

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sudo systemctl --system daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable home-assistant
sudo systemctl start home-assistant

If everything went well, sudo systemctl start home-assistant should give you a positive feedback.

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$ sudo systemctl status home-assistant -l
● home-assistant.service - Home Assistant
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/home-assistant.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2015-06-25 23:38:37 CEST; 3min 13s ago
 Main PID: 8557 (python3.4)
   CGroup: /system.slice/home-assistant.service
           └─8557 /usr/bin/python3.4 -m homeassistant
[...]

To get Home Assistant’s logging output, simple use journalctl.

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sudo journalctl -f -u home-assistant

In the future, if you want to update to the latest version, run pip3 install --upgrade home-assistant.

Those instructions were written for Fedora 22 Server and Workstation. They may work for Cloud flavor as well but this was not tested.

Coming soon…


Installation with Docker is straightforward. Adjust the following command so that /path/to/your/config/ points at the folder where you want to store your config and run it:

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docker run -d --name="home-assistant" -v /path/to/your/config:/config -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro --net=host balloob/home-assistant

This will launch Home Assistant and serve its web interface from port 8123 on your Docker host.

When using boot2docker on OS X you are unable to map the local time to your Docker container. Replace -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro with -e "TZ=America/Los_Angeles" (replacing America/Los_Angeles with your timezone)

Home Assistant uses Python 3.4. This makes installation on a Raspberry Pi a bit more difficult as it is not available in the package repository. Please follow the following instructions to get it up and running.

Step 1. Install pyenv

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curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yyuu/pyenv-installer/master/bin/pyenv-installer | bash

After the installation is done, run:

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nano ~/.bashrc

Then add these lines to the end of the file and save:

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export PATH="$HOME/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"
Step 2. Install requirements
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sudo apt-get install python3-dev
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev libreadline-dev libbz2-dev

Log out and then back in so your bashrc is reloaded.

NOTE: the rest of the commands are not being run as sudo and will install python etc under you user’s home directory.

Step 3. Install python 3.4.2 (this will take a few hours)

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pyenv install 3.4.2

Step 4. Create Python Virtual Environment

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pyenv virtualenv 3.4.2 homeassistant

Step 5. Set the virtual environment

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cd home-assistant
pyenv local homeassistant

Step 6. Install Home Assistant

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pip3 install homeassistant

Step 7. Start it up

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hass

It will be up and running on port 8123

In the future, if you want to update to the latest version, run pip3 install --upgrade home-assistant.

Next step: configuring Home Assistant »