Manual installation on a Raspberry Pi

This installation of Home Assistant requires the Raspberry Pi to run Raspbian Lite. The installation will be installed in a Virtual Environment with minimal overhead. Instructions assume this is a new installation of Raspbian Lite.

Connect to the Raspberry Pi over SSH. Default password is raspberry. You will need to enable SSH access. The Raspberry Pi website has instructions here.

$ ssh pi@ipadress

Changing the default password is encouraged.

$ passwd

Update the system.

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

Install the dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-venv python3-pip

Add an account for Home Assistant called homeassistant. Since this account is only for running Home Assistant the extra arguments of -rm is added to create a system account and create a home directory.

$ sudo useradd -rm homeassistant

Next we will create a directory for the installation of Home Assistant and change the owner to the homeassistant account.

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

Next up is to create and change to a virtual environment for Home Assistant. This will be done as the homeassistant account.

$ sudo su -s /bin/bash homeassistant
$ cd /srv/homeassistant
$ python3 -m venv .
$ source bin/activate

Once you have activated the virtual environment you will notice the prompt change and then you can install Home Assistant.

(homeassistant) homeassistant@raspberrypi:/srv/homeassistant $ pip3 install homeassistant

Start Home Assistant for the first time. This will complete the installation, create the .homeassistant configuration directory in the /home/homeassistant directory and install any basic dependencies.

(homeassistant) $ hass

You can now reach your installation on your Raspberry Pi over the web interface on http://ipaddress:8123.