hi guys and welcome back to another ibra corp video thanks for tuning in with us today just a
quick shout out to all my subscribers thank you very much for your support i've also received
some donations which has been really fantastic i really really appreciate it it just helps us get
the motivation to keep going and keep helping everybody out in the community so today we are
going to talk about installing home assistant we're going to do it a little bit differently
and i'll show you some extra settings that will make your life a little easier
once we've got it up and running i'll take you through the dashboard briefly i'll also show
you how to install it on unraid using a disk image rather than an iso and instead of docker
so the reason we want to go with the virtual machine option is because home assistant actually
is packaged as an operating system in itself on linux but as an os it gives you a lot more control
of its features whether you're running it on docker or running it hosted within a vm it's not
as powerful and doesn't give you as much control as having it as its own os which they provide you
so what is home assistant so home assistant provides a central point where all of your
internet of things devices can communicate and be monitored and it's really really powerful
you know for example i've got a laser printer as far as i knew i've just had to connect to
the printer in print but with home assistant it gives me all sorts of sensor data on the printer
that i can access and read for example how much ink is left and how much printing's been done
apart from that you can also control obviously all your smart devices so
you can have all your smart devices in one area that includes your google home your alexas etc
you can even send text commands to speak on your google speaker and let me tell you my partner
wasn't too happy when she heard that sitting in the middle of the kitchen the other day
so we've got home assistant's main page up at the moment home hyphen assistant dot io just a brief
look open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first powered by a worldwide
community of tinkerers and diy enthusiasts perfect to run on a raspberry pi or a local server
now it's worth noting that you can actually have this on a raspberry pi and if you have wireless
built-in it can act as a wireless connection as well so you don't have to have it wired
in a server per se or whether that's the method that we're going to use today because we don't
have a raspberry pi and we want to use it on an unraid server so here's a couple of notes on the
product itself home assistant will track the state of all devices in your home so you don't have to
you can control them all in your phone as well using their apps and you can automate stuff in
the app as well so you know why not dim the lights when you start watching a movie on your chromecast
there's plenty of support for different products and services here which is really really cool so
guys let's get stuck into it okay so we're on the install page now this is the official page here
and there's a couple of different options that you'll see when you first arrive on the page
that allow you to install this so the first is an image and these are the devices the images are for
and the next is a virtual appliance so you've got vmdk vhdx vdi qqr2 and ova
now some people have used the qcal2 virtual appliance here and that also works guys there's
there's no in my opinion there's no uh one is better than the other
but in my case today i'm going to show you how to use a vmdk and the reason why is sometimes
you might have vmdk for other os's that you might want to use on your unraid so we're going to show
you how to use that so that it's not just for home assistant but any other image that uses vmdk
so if we scroll down it starts giving instructions on how to install
now we could read this but it's not going to translate directly to unraid for us so we're
just going to go through and look at it using unraid so the first thing you want to do is
download the vmdk if i just scroll back up here under virtual appliance we'll just download this
so we've downloaded the file here as you can see it's about 237 megabytes not too big the
first thing we're going to need to do is extract it so if you're using winrar or something similar
you can just right click it and click extract to and it will create a folder just like this one
and then you can see our vmdk is there
so we've got that ready the next thing we want to do is go to our unraid server
so i'm on our unraid server here i've signed in and we've gone to
vms now if you don't see this it will say that vm option is switched off simply go to settings
vm manager and make sure that enable vms is ticked to yes
and hit apply so back in vms we have the option to add a vm before we can do that we have to move
the file to its directory where we're going to need to use it so if you head back to shares
you'll notice that we have the domain share now domains is where by default
unless you've changed it your virtual disks are stored for any vms that you operate
so as long as you've got your domain share there click on that and if you come down you'll see the
smb security settings and this is just to allow us to get to it on our file explorer on windows so
make sure you've got the share name that's fine export is to yes case sensitive is auto
and security is at the moment is public if you have it set to secure or private
it just means that you'll need to make sure you use credentials when we access it via the file
explorer so we'll leave this on vms and now let's head back to our file explorer so first thing
we'll do is copy our downloaded and extracted vmdk image for home assistant we'll copy that
and we'll head to our server directory so we've copied that now and we've accessed the server
in our windows explorer here and as you can see we can see our domains folder
so we'll just click that and at the moment it's empty i don't have any vms
we'll click new folder and we'll give it a name now this name will be the same name that we give
it in unraid once we set up the vm so we'll just call this hacio as it's sometimes known
click on that and then paste your vmdk image
so now that that's copied we can close our file explorer head back to unraid and click add vm
you can just pick linux
for the name we'll give this hacio just to make sure it matches our disk folder name
so for the description we're just going to put an ip address that we'd like it to be at
that we know will always be static and just a brief description of what it is okay it makes it
really handy when you want to go back and look at your vms and at a brief glance you can just
see what its ip address is and what version you originally installed or what it is that's on there
so for the cpus i'll just give it these two for the cpus initial memory now this
is where the documentation comes in handy if you just scroll down
so we're using the vmdk which is the vm vmware workstation
and we've unpacked it we can see here that it says give it at least two gigabytes of ram
and one cpu all right no worries so we'll come back here we've given it two and we'll give it its
minimum two gig so usually when you're first setting up the vm you might have the iso and
this is where you would select the iso alright but in our case we don't need the iso it's already
technically installed we just want to load the disk that it's installed on and that's what we
copied over so as you can see by default the primary vdisk location says that it's mnt user
domains hasio v disk image one they automatically generated this by the name that we set up here
now we have all these folders correct already because we we've created them
in windows explorer except for the disk image name so we're going to click manual
and you can just navigate to it so user
domains casio you notice it won't show the disk image that's that's fine so what we want to do
and if we come back to our explorer here
make sure you copy this exactly as it is guys including the file extension and if you don't
see the file extension in windows explorer hit the view option up here and check file name extensions
and then we simply just put that on the end just like that
scroll down a little further your network bridge mode you want that on br0
if you want to expose it out and have its own ip address which i recommend
and start the vm after creation so just hit create
and there you go so now it's running and you might be wondering how do we now access it so as you can
see back on our install guide once you've loaded it it should be accessible at this url http colon
forward slash forward slash homeassistant.local semicolon8123 so as you can see we've hit the
url now and it's telling us that it's basically preparing so excellent all you have to do really
is sit back at this point and just give it some time if you can't get through using the url you
can use the ip address now the ip address by default will will be expected to be handed out
by your dhcp so wherever your router is if you go back to your router and in my case i'm using ddwrt
under status under dhcp you can see the ip address that has been handed out
and there you go so we've loaded up and it's ready for us to set up our account
so pretty straightforward we'll enter our name
we'll enter a password and we'll hit create account
you can pick a location pick your time zone
all you americans out there will probably never have to scroll down this far
but we'll just go down to melbourne australia sydney that's fine and click next
so what you're seeing here is home assistants all automatically picked up these
products using the router so it's found these devices on the network
and it's asking us if we want to set them up so for example if you click google cast
you can say where it is and click finish and now that's basically configured and you can do the
same for the rest so here's our printer we'll just click submit and we'll say it's in the living room
and click finish and welcome to the landing page so as you can see overview is your main dashboard
and already we're picking up items that we've added so here's the printer it's telling us
it's asleep how many pages it's printed how much of the drum is left toner left
you know all that sort of information right at the right on first glance which is amazing
and if you come down to configuration and click integrations add integration
here's the list of stuff out of the box that you can basically monitor it's quite a big list
there's a lot of things in here which is really really cool guys so
there's more videos on the on the setup of integrations out there already i just wanted
to sort of show you how to get this going there's one more step that might help you
so the first thing you want to do is make sure that you've set a static ip address
for the server so in your router you should be able to see the name of the device which will be
home assistant the current ip address that it has which might be different to what you want it to be
and its mac address you can put the mac address in and the host name and the ip address you actually
want it to be then go ahead and restart your server by going to vms restart and it should
come back up on that particular ip address instead of just some random one all right
you might have a really laid out network and you want a specific ip address for that server now so
that you can put it in a directory know that it's always available there this that's how to do it
the next step is exposing our home assistant out now guys i've touched on nginx proxy manager many
times i'm going to touch on it real quick once more just to show you how to get this going
so back in nginx proxy manager here and as you can see we've already set up our domain and
proxy for home assistant so i'm just giving you a brief look at what it looks like just so you can
copy it straight over to yours so we've got the domain name the scheme the ip address and the
default port which is 8123 i've checked all the options here and i've picked this ssl certificate
so if you don't know how to do any of this stuff guys there's i've already made a video on nginx
proxy manager and on cloudflare because we also had to create a dns in cloudflare so
please go check that out it's just going to help give you an overview and all that
and really this is the most important part of having it as a operating system of itself instead
of using docker for example is the supervisor feature now i know you can install it separately
in docker but this is just the all-in-one solution that's provided directly from them
and is the recommended way to run it from home assistant team as you can see you've got your
snapshots your add-on store so you've got even more stuff here that you can pick from to install
and all your system settings now i may not have mentioned it earlier but it's also worth
noting that this is a free and open source product and is worked on by heaps of people
you know that have just a lot of love and passion for it and it's basically a challenge towards all
the proprietary and paid alternatives that offer you the same thing or sometimes less and you
have to pay for it in this case it's totally free so you can run it from your home anytime
so thanks for tuning in guys i'll see you in the next ibrachor video if you have
any comments or feedback any suggestions just leave it down in the comments below
and as usual please like and subscribe thank you for your time
you