Just use Docker?

There are a few things you can't do with docker (my case was an addon that I wanted). The install docs have a good grid of the differences.

I also don’t think Docker can do ARP network interrogation, though I could be wrong about that. Also not sure how it handles mDNS.

Overlooked option for running these things in containers is macvlan networking. Just give it its own MAC address on the network. Works great and you don't have to compromise on isolation.

The benefit of docker for home assistant is the packaging of it, rather than isolation. You can always run a container with host network mode and privileged mode so that it can access everything it needs to the same as if it were running directly on the host.

As an alternative to host network mode, you can give the container a dedicated IP on your network using the macvlan driver.

You can run in host network mode to avoid that.

I've ditched all ARP, mDNS in my setup. Everything is static IP addresses: it vastly improved robustness against network glitches, which absolutely will happen to you.

If my router is unplugged or offline, everything with power can still communicate for example.

Nearly everything is static on mine too. I keep track of all the various devices' MAC addresses and assign them one IP. I also make sure that, even should I reinstall an OS on a device and "forget" to assign it a static IP, my router always assigns that MAC address the static IP I picked for that MAC address. I then keep a little range of IP addresses for unknown devices that the router is allowed to use when a new device shows up. Once in a while I log into my router and look which new device(s) I forgot to assign a static IP too.

When you say you ditched all ARP, did you do anything special? For example do you configure, on all your machines, static ARP entries for each MAC address of all your devices?

Sorry what I meant was I don't depend on any dynamic discovery systems like inspecting ARP tables.

You can get mDNS working in Docker, but IMO it's much easier to give up and use host networking. It is _very_ difficult to get mDNS working in K8s.

I think it can, if you run your Docker containers in host network mode. I run my HA in docker using host mode, and it auto-detects all new devices that pop up on my network.

Can't do with docker or can't do as easily with docker as you can with HAOS? My understanding has been that everything can be done by just adding new containers or files, and it's worked for me thus far.

If you're using things like USB Zigbee dongles, they can be a pain to pass through to the docker container, or just not possible at all on macOS.

HAOS uses docker to containerize everything, so it can’t be that difficult, and it really is not. Docker has a —-device flag for this purpose, udev makes it easy enough to assign stable names.

Docker does not support USB/serial device passthrough on macOS https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot-and-support/faq...

macOS is not really a good OS for running a server anyway, and Docker Desktop is intended for development more than anything else.

zigbee2mqtt makes things easier to establish the bridge. Running as a container, next to home assistant container.

Trust me it's not worth the effort to get USB passthrough for HAOS on Docker.

What do you mean by “HAOS on docker”. HAOS is a standalone complete Linux system with its own fully managed kernel, not meant to be containerized. It uses docker internally itself though and “pass through” works transparently.

If you’re talking about running home assistant in a docker container, sure you’re more on your own, but since official home assistant in HAOS must run in docker, none of this is terribly difficult to configure.

The dongles are usually exposed as tty devices and I’ve been running zigbee2mqtt and Zwavejs addons in docker containers for years with no issue. HAOS takes care of stable naming (based on default udev rules) out of the box.

Unlike system virtualization, there isn’t really anything that needs passing through, it’s a naming and permissions issue - the container just needs an appropriately permissioned dev node ideally with a stable name. If you are using official addons it is effectively zero-config, and if you’re not, sorry but I don’t find the configuration to ensure a dev node to be anything but straightforward container config.

As someone else mentioned it may be as simple as:

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

But you can just as easily use the /dev/serial tree to have stable names. Those names come out of the box with udev. You can always make your own too, I’ve done it, it’s not hard.

HA can be deployed as a container. Yes it uses containers.

I’m impressed with your knowledge of the Linux ecosystem. Regardless, passing usb devices to the containerised version is still more effort than it’s worth for the average user.

I'm doing USB passthrough for Z Wave right now and it's trivial. Just bind a volume to the device file.

Maybe Zigbee is different for some reason?

USB passthrough for docker (and LVM) is a massive pain. Avoid if you're just starting out. VMs or physical deployments are much more straight forward.

Maybe you can consider USB/IP to pass thorough USB device over network.

Could you elaborate? I run HA in docker, and the extent of necessary configuration was adding this in docker-compose.yml:

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

From what I know, HAOS runs on Docker in the backend, plugins are basically containers that are started up

Have HA running without any issue on a Linux KVM VM.