No HAOS? No Problem

When you look into setting up your Home Assistant, you quickly find out that you either need to run the software as a systemd service, inside a container or directly using their VM solution called HAOS. Usually people who doesn’t own hypervisors would look to the first and second solution, but then end up find out that a lot of cool features are more complicated to set up than if you went with the HAOS distribution. But then you need to have a VM, and indirectly some hypervisor, which might be a rebuttal for some people (not a lot but still).

I don't think a lot of people know, but you can have the advantages of Home Assistant OS inside your homelab server you use for other things without having to run it with HomeAssistantOS under an VM. All you need is to install the homeassistant-supervised daemon into the system you want to use, like here in ArchLinux/Manjaro :

 yay -Sa  homeassistant-supervised

homeassistant-supervised orchestrate the Home Assistant container using docker, which you also need to install (I was using Podman for my deployment), but then you get the same advantages as the HAOS operating system, the complementary modules feature, easy update of the software, backups, etc…

And if you were like me, and you would like to transfer your past configuration and settings into the supervised version of home assistant, as for Archlinux, you just need to move the .haconfig folder to /usr/shar/hassio/homeassistant/

sudo rsync -avh --delete /<location_of_your>/.haconfig/ /usr/share/hassio/homeassistant/

To note, since I’ve migrated a year now, I have been running without issues, but your mileage can vary based on the environment you are installing to : Apart warnings related to a cgroup version incompatibility and unsupported distro, the supervisor deploys the networking and control the docker service in a manner that could interact weirdly with the other software on your home lab instance. So be ready to break some stuff during your first deployment (I know that won’t stop anybody :D)