HASS On Unraid: Installation

Posted May 27, 2022

By Richard Niemand 2 min read

This post is part of a series covering running various containers on Unraid.

Download the VM Image

First you will need to obtain the latest image from the Home Assistant website (see this page) - in my installation I am using the .qcow2 image as shown below:

Once downloaded you can use a tool like 7-Zip to extract the contents to a working folder, you should now have the following files:

This is the extracted contents of the zip file

Create the Home Assistant VM

Next, you will need to create a new VM in Unraid making use of the Linux template and apply the appropriate configuration for your VM, in my case I used the following.

VM Name: HomeAssistant
CPU Assignment: decided to go with 4 CPU’s to start (can always add more later on)
Memory: Started with 8 GB - however you can get away with as little a 1 GB in a pinch

Ensure that you set the Primary vDisk Location to point to the .qcow2 image you downloaded - I would suggest placing the image in your /mnt/user/domains/... directory as this is the assumed location by Unraid when working with virtual machines.

Ensure that you assign the network as bridged as some of the functionality of Home Assistant will break without this - assign a MAC Address for the VM (you can use this to enforce static IPs on your router) and select the appropriate network driver.

Adding an Icon

You can edit the XML file for your VM as shown below to add in a custom image for Home Assistant to make your VM stand out (if you have a number of them).

  
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<domain type="kvm">
  <name>HomeAssistant</name>
  <uuid>054a17e7-fdc0-3238-bf05-6d00ad80b7b3</uuid>
  <metadata>
    <vmtemplate xmlns="unraid" name="Linux" icon="/mnt/user/domains/home_assistant_2021/logo.png" os="linux"/>
  </metadata>

First Time Setup

Once your VM is created and you are happy with the configuration you can start it:

Showing off the custom logo assigned above

It may take some time for the initial startup to complete, you can connect to the VM using the built in VNC browser and should see the following splash screen when Home Assistant has successfully started up: