Home Assistant in Docker (Ubuntu 16.04)

After problem upgrading to v0.65, I moved my Home Assistant (HA) to docker. Trying to upgrade in virtual environment (VE) was giving an error message that i needed Python 3.5.3.

I don’t have any experience with docker, beside setting up influxdb and grafana from this guide: https://philhawthorne.com/getting-started-with-grafana-influxdb-for-home-assistant/.

I’m currently running HA on Ubuntu 16.04.

I started reading some docs as my docker experience is close to zero. The docs was very easy to read, so I recommend taking a look at them first or if you are stuck.

Portainer

I use Portainer as an admin-panel to docker. I used Portainer to start HA after setting up the composer file. See https://portainer.io/install.html.

Create docker compose file

After running HA in VE, my HA config is located in /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant. I created a new file in the same directory, called docker-compose.yml, with this content:

version: '3'
services:
  homeassistant:
    container_name: home-assistant
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant
    volumes:
      - /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    devices:
      - /dev/ttyACM0:/dev/ttyACM0
    restart: always
    network_mode: host

You need to change the config-path under volumes to your own, and map any devices you might have.

Install docker-composer

Follow this guide: https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/#install-compose, to install the newest version.

You can check if you have docker-composer installed and which version by running:
# docker-compose –version

I used this command to install it:
# sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.19.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Then set the correct permission:
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Test docker compose file

In the directory /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant run the command:
# docker-compose up

You can use the «-d» flag to compose the container in the background, like:
# docker-compose up -d

If you don’t use the -d flag, it will start the container and run it from the console, and give you some output like this:

user@homeassistant:/home/homeassistant/.homeassistant# docker-compose up
Recreating home-assistant ... done
Attaching to home-assistant
home-assistant   | 2018-03-11 23:13:39 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event service_registered[L]: domain=homeassistant, service=turn_off>
home-assistant   | 2018-03-11 23:13:39 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event service_registered[L]: domain=homeassistant, service=turn_on>
home-assistant   | 2018-03-11 23:13:39 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event service_registered[L]: domain=homeassistant, service=toggle>
home-assistant   | 2018-03-11 23:13:39 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event service_registered[L]: domain=homeassistant, service=stop>
home-assistant   | 2018-03-11 23:13:39 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event service_registered[L]: domain=homeassistant, service=restart>
...

After testing that HA was working, I pressed CTRL+C to exist the container.

Then I started it with Portainer.

Update Home Assistant

When googling, it tells me to delete the docker and compose it again. I used Portainer to stop and remove the container, but when trying to compose – the same old docker-image was started. Not sure why, maybe I have to use another command to delete the image? And the remove button just removes it from Portainer?

To upgrade I found a nice button in Portainer that said «Recreate». After clicking on this, I got a message asking to pull the latest image. This worked as a charm 🙂

Without Portainer

Pull latest image

# docker pull homeassistant/home-assistant:0.66.1
0.66.1: Pulling from homeassistant/home-assistant
f2b6b4884fc8: Already exists
4fb899b4df21: Already exists
74eaa8be7221: Already exists
2d6e98fe4040: Already exists
414666f7554d: Already exists
7e765f6e07f8: Already exists
6f02823cd02e: Already exists
9239d3c3d426: Already exists
c4588092e44e: Pull complete
0df739409539: Pull complete
ec55ff9b9eba: Downloading [========> ] 24.54 MB/138.8 MB
4612542e1cd0: Download complete
d0adb9eb47e0: Downloading [====> ] 12.37 MB/140.1 MB

Find docker ID.

# docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
62cc40bf3fed homeassistant/home-assistant "python -m homeass..." 2 minutes ago Exited (137) About a minute ago

Take the returned ID and remove container.

# docker rm <id>

# docker-compose up -d
Creating home-assistant ... done