Manual Method of Installing Home Assistant in Raspberry Pi

There are number of ways available to run your own Home Assistant installation including downloading ready images comes Home Assistant pre-installed in it. Here we are discussing a manual method of installing Home Assistant in Raspberry Pi already running latest Raspbian OS in it.

Contents:

• Manual Method of Installing Home Assistant in Raspberry Pi
  • Step I – Installing the software dependencies
  • Step II – Installing & Running the Home Assistant
  • Step III – Auto Start Home Assistant on reboot

Manual Method of Installing Home Assistant in Raspberry Pi:

Step I: Installing the software dependencies:

• Update the operating system.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

• Installing the dependencies such as python etc.

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev python3-venv python3-pip libffi-dev libssl-dev

• Creating an user account for home assistant.

sudo useradd -rm homeassistant -G dialout,gpio,i2c

• Creating directories for installation of home assistant.

cd /srv
sudo mkdir homeassistant
sudo chown homeassistant:homeassistant homeassistant

• create and change to a virtual environment for Home Assistant.

sudo -u homeassistant -H -s
cd /srv/homeassistant
python3 -m venv .
source bin/activate

• Install a required python package.

python3 -m pip install wheel

Step II: Installing & Running the Home Assistant:

• Installing Home Assistant package.

pip3 install homeassistant

• Running the Home Assistant.

hass

• For the first time, hass command will download, install and cache the necessary libraries/dependencies which may take 5 to 10 minutes.
• Once procedure is completed, you can reach the Home Assistant Web Interface at http://ipaddress:8123.

Step III: Auto Start Home Assistant on reboot:

• Creating systemd service file for Home Assistant.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/hass.service

Note: You may encounter a situation, where you will be asked for a password for a user homeassistant on issuing the command given above. To avoid this issue, just open a new ssh session / terminal with user pi.

• Paste the following contents in the Nano editor using Right mouse key.

[Unit]
Description=Home Assistant
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=homeassistant
ExecStart=/srv/homeassistant/bin/hass
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Save the file by pressing “CTRL” and “X” key. Editor will ask for the confirmation to save the file. Press “Y” key and hit “Enter”.
• Reload systemd configuration.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

• Enable hass  service to start at boot.

sudo systemctl enable hass

• Starting hass  service

sudo systemctl start hass.service

Have Fun!