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Getting Started with Home Assistant

· 4 min read · 757 words
homeassistant smarthome automation proxmox homelab
Contents

Why Home Assistant?

Most smart home ecosystems (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit) are cloud-dependent. Your lights, locks, and sensors phone home to a server. If the company shuts down, changes their API, or has an outage, your devices stop working.

Home Assistant is a local, open-source smart home platform. It runs on your network, integrates with over 3,000 services and devices, and keeps all automations local. Your automations run even when the internet is down.

Running Home Assistant on Proxmox

The recommended way to run Home Assistant is as the Home Assistant OS (HAOS) — a complete appliance image. It manages updates, add-ons, and backups through a clean UI.

Import the HAOS VM Image

On your Proxmox node:

# Download the Proxmox-specific image
wget https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/13.2/haos_ova-13.2.qcow2.xz
xz -d haos_ova-13.2.qcow2.xz

Create a new VM in Proxmox (via UI or CLI):

  • OS: Do not use any media
  • System: UEFI, SCSI controller, machine q35
  • Disk: Delete the default disk — you’ll import the image
  • CPU: 2 cores
  • Memory: 4 GB (2 GB minimum, 4 GB if running many integrations)
  • Network: VirtIO

Import the disk:

qm importdisk 100 haos_ova-13.2.qcow2 local-lvm

In the VM’s Hardware tab, attach the imported disk (Unused Disk 0) as the boot disk. Set boot order to this disk.

Start the VM and navigate to http://homeassistant.local:8123 or the VM’s IP on port 8123.

Initial Setup

The first boot takes a few minutes to provision. The onboarding wizard asks for:

  1. Your name and location (used for sun-based automations, local time)
  2. Whether to share analytics (optional)
  3. Home Assistant creates a local account — this is not cloud-based

Adding Integrations

Go to Settings -> Devices & Services -> Add Integration. Home Assistant auto-discovers many devices on your network (Philips Hue, Sonos, Chromecasts, etc.).

Popular integrations:

  • Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) — native Zigbee coordinator support
  • Z-Wave JS — Z-Wave devices
  • MQTT — for DIY sensors and many IoT devices
  • ESPHome — custom ESP8266/ESP32 sensors
  • Philips Hue — via local API (no cloud)
  • Sonos — local control
  • Unifi — presence detection via network
  • OPNsense — network stats
  • HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) — third-party integrations

USB Dongle Passthrough in Proxmox

For Zigbee or Z-Wave, you need a USB coordinator dongle passed through to the HA VM.

In Proxmox, go to the VM’s Hardware -> Add -> USB Device:

  • Use USB Vendor/Device ID — select your dongle from the list

Popular dongles:

  • Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (~$20) — excellent Zigbee support
  • HUSBZB-1 — dual Zigbee/Z-Wave, useful if you have both protocols

In Home Assistant, add the Zigbee Home Automation integration and point it at your USB device (typically /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/serial/by-id/...).

Automations

Automations consist of:

  • Trigger — what starts the automation (time, state change, event)
  • Condition (optional) — when it should run (e.g., only if someone is home)
  • Action — what to do (turn on lights, send notification, etc.)

Example automation: turn on lights at sunset

alias: Evening lights
trigger:
  - platform: sun
    event: sunset
    offset: "-00:30:00"
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: person.adam
    state: home
action:
  - service: light.turn_on
    target:
      area_id: living_room
    data:
      brightness_pct: 60
      color_temp: 3000

Add-ons

Home Assistant OS supports add-ons — containerised apps that run alongside HA and integrate tightly:

  • Mosquitto Broker — local MQTT broker for IoT devices
  • ESPHome — manage custom ESP32 sensors
  • Node-RED — visual automation builder (more powerful than built-in automations)
  • Zigbee2MQTT — alternative Zigbee coordinator (more device support than ZHA)
  • Samba — share the HA config directory over SMB for easy editing
  • VS Code Server — edit config files in a browser-based VS Code

Install from Settings -> Add-ons -> Add-on Store.

Dashboards

Home Assistant’s dashboard (Lovelace) is highly customisable. Go to Overview and click the pencil icon to edit.

The HACS store has hundreds of custom cards:

  • Mini Graph Card — compact line graphs for sensors
  • Mushroom Cards — clean, modern card designs
  • ApexCharts Card — advanced graphing

Presence Detection

Home Assistant can determine who’s home via:

  • Mobile app (iPhone/Android) — GPS + local Wi-Fi detection
  • Network scanner — detect devices by MAC address on the network
  • Bluetooth — detect BLE devices
  • UniFi integration — read connected clients from UniFi controller

Presence detection powers automations like “turn off everything when everyone leaves” and “unlock the door when I arrive home”.

Backups

Home Assistant has built-in backup under Settings -> System -> Backups. Backups are .tar files containing your config, automations, and database.

Store backups offsite: configure the Google Drive Backup add-on or manually sync to your NAS. You can also restore entirely from a backup onto new hardware — HA backups are self-contained.