Home Assistant

• Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/core
• License: Apache 2.0
• Alternatives: openHAB, Domoticz, Node-RED

Open-source home automation platform. Integrates with thousands of devices and services, supports local processing, and serves as the event bus for voice-triggered automations.

Home Assistant is a complementary service — nothing else in the stack talks to it, so it can run on its own machine or its own schedule without affecting anything. That matters more here than for most: if you're using a Zigbee or Z-Wave stick, HA needs to live on the machine that stick is plugged into, which may not be the machine running the rest of the stack. It still comes up from the repo root with everything else (./existential.sh && docker compose up -d) — being complementary means you can move it, not that it needs separate commands.

See the blog post Optimizing my life, now with Home Assistant for a real-world setup walkthrough.

Getting Started

1. Enable the service in .env.shared:

   EXIST_IS_SERVICES_HOMEASSISTANT=true

2. Run ./existential.sh to render templates and regenerate the compose file
3. Start the container:

   docker compose up -d homeassistant

4. Log in at https://homeassistant.EXIST_DOMAIN with your EXIST_USERNAME login — the homeassistant-onboarding decree migration creates the admin account for you (see services/homeassistant/.env for the generated password), so there's no setup wizard to click through

Home Assistant generates its own configuration.yaml on first boot inside the homeassistant_data volume — no manual pre-configuration needed.

On a genuinely fresh install, the container restarts itself once a few seconds into the very first boot — that's entrypoint.sh finishing a proxy-trust fix HA can't apply until it has written its own storage once (details in that file). If https://homeassistant.EXIST_DOMAIN blips or 400s for a moment right after docker compose up -d, that's this one-time restart; reload the page and it's gone for good.

Network & Device Discovery

Home Assistant runs on the shared exist bridge network like every other service, reached through Caddy at https://homeassistant.EXIST_DOMAIN — not network_mode: host. That keeps it behind the same TLS/Caddy front door as the rest of the stack, but it has a real cost: HA's own Docker docs call --net=host a requirement for zeroconf/mDNS and SSDP/UPnP discovery, and a Docker bridge does not forward multicast traffic out to the LAN. Devices and services that rely on it to announce themselves — Chromecast, Sonos, HomeKit accessories, ESPHome's auto-discovery, many network printers — will not show up under Settings → Devices & Services → Discovered automatically on this setup.

This doesn't block using them: add such a device with its integration's manual/static-IP setup instead of relying on discovery. If you'd rather have discovery and are fine with HA leaving exist (it becomes unreachable by container name from anything else in the stack, and Caddy can no longer front it since it isn't publishing 8123 on the bridge), switch to network_mode: host in docker-compose.yml yourself and access it directly on :8123.

Hardware Access

If you're connecting USB hardware (Zigbee sticks, Z-Wave controllers, etc.), uncomment privileged: true in docker-compose.yml and add the device path:

devices:
  - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0

Identify the device path on the host:

ls /dev/serial/by-id/

Voice

Home Assistant's Assist pipeline speaks the Wyoming protocol — a small, line-oriented TCP protocol — not HTTP. That is why the stack ships two purpose-built services for it rather than reusing WhisperX and Chatterbox, which are HTTP services HA cannot drive:

	Service	Port
Speech → text	wyoming-whisper	10300
Text → speech	wyoming-piper	10200

Both run on CPU by design. The GPU is already holding the chat model and the embedding model; a GPU voice model would evict them mid-answer, and a spoken reply needs to land immediately anyway.

Wiring it up

The homeassistant-wyoming-hermes decree migration does this for you: both Wyoming integrations, a conversation-agent entry pointed at Hermes (not raw OpenAI — HA's own built-in OpenAI Conversation integration has no custom-endpoint option, so this uses the extended_openai_conversation custom component that exist.initial.sh installs instead), and an Assist pipeline tying all three together as the preferred one. Nothing to click through.

On a fresh install this all lands before HA's first boot. If you're adding it to an already-running instance, restart the homeassistant container once first — HA only picks up a new custom_components/ folder on boot, and the migration fails loudly with that exact instruction if it isn't loaded yet.

The STT/TTS models are chosen globally in .env.shared — EXIST_MODEL_STT, EXIST_MODEL_STT_LANGUAGE and EXIST_MODEL_TTS_VOICE. See How it works for the full model-selection block. The conversation brain is whatever Hermes itself is configured to answer with — see Hermes's own Model configuration.

Long-Lived Access Token

Many integrations (HAwake, Tasker via TaskerHA, external scripts) need a long-lived access token:

1. HA → Profile (bottom-left avatar) → Long-Lived Access Tokens → Create Token
2. Copy and store the token securely — it's only shown once

Automations

HA automations are defined in YAML or via the UI under Settings → Automations & Scenes.

See HAwake → Home Assistant → Tasker for a complete example of using a custom wake word to trigger Tasker actions through HA.

Services

Endpoint	URL
Web Interface	https://homeassistant.EXIST_DOMAIN
REST API	https://homeassistant.EXIST_DOMAIN/api/

Backup

Not wired up yet. homeassistant_data (recorder SQLite DB + configuration.yaml

• everything else in /config) has no automation-backup cron — unlike most other services in this stack, nothing currently copies it off-box. To add one, copy a volume-backup cron file (e.g. mealie-volume-backup-nightly.md/-weekly.md) from services/automation/backup/cron.example/ to a new homeassistant-volume-backup-*.md, point its VOLUMES: block at homeassistant_data homeassistant, drop it into services/automation/backup/cron/, and restart automation-backup.

Debugging

# Container logs
docker logs homeassistant

# Configuration check (run inside the container)
docker exec homeassistant python -m homeassistant --script check_config --config /config

# Recent HA log entries
docker exec homeassistant tail -n 100 /config/home-assistant.log