A simple setup to configure your own smart home server based on 🏡 Home Assistant with a container based approach on a Raspberry Pi
Home Assistant is used as main cencentrator / Hub to rule them all!
Using different proprietary home automation gateways and systems can be annoying over time, open source solutions are definitely improving interoperability between eco-systems
Below is the chosen architecture and underlying components :
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Concentrator | a Home Assistant instance managed as central control system for smart home devices |
| Zigbee Controller | a dedicated Zigbee Hub to connect the main wireless sensors / devices managed by a customized OpenWrt linux distro and running a Zigbee2MQTT instance |
| Z-Wave Controller | a dedicated Z-Wave Hub to connect some additionnal legacy devices |
| Message Broker | a MQTT broker to send/publish messages back and forth |
| Control API | a RESTful architecture to manage some remote commands on some smart controllers |
The Raspberry Pi 3 is the right candidate to run home automation open source assets, however the guidelines provided in this repo can be used on pretty much any platform managed by Docker.
To install Raspberry PI OS on device plenty of tutorials are available online. For beginners a HowTo for a Headless RPI setup on Mac is available. Following a clean install it is recommended to switch to a read-only file system to preserve SD card lifetime.
If you already have a Raspberry Pi set up with Raspbian, internet and enabled SSH, you can skip this first step.
Overall these are some pre-requisites for a robust and reliable home automation solution :
- SSH Keys for remote authentication
- Ethernet connection to be prefered for security purposes
- External drive as main storage for docker data
Install Docker and Docker-compose with the following guide
Create a folder to hold all your docker data on device (e.g. /mnt/usbdrive/docker/). Then clone this repository and copy the content on target, finally update the .env file located in /compose-files
Finally run the containers with docker-compose :
docker-compose -f base.yml up -d
docker-compose -f homeautomation.yml up -d
// to see logs
docker-compose -f ...yml logs -f
// to see if containers are running
docker-compose -f ...yml ps
// to stop
docker-compose -f ...yml down
base.yml Docker Compose file :
| Service | Port | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| Portainer | 9443 | Create credentials with the first login at https://domopi.local:9443/ |
| Fluentd | 24224 (udp) | - |
homeautomation.yml Docker Compose file :
| Service | Port | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| HomeAssistant | 8123 | Just go to the homepage and follow the setup wizard at http://domopi.local:8123 |
| Mosquitto | 1883 | The server relies on the configuration located in /conf/mosquitto and already configured in Mosquitto container. A new authentication entry and password must created for all MQTT clients. For more details reach the installation guide |
| zwave-js-ui | - | Setup can be done according to the guide especially for the binding of the USB Z-Wave controller. Web interface is available at http://domopi.local:8091 |
Fluentd is used in this smart home setup as a unified logging solution to store/manage App logs, it requires very little system resource so is a good match with the chosen Pi-based platform.
More info about Fluentd flow and configuration : https://docs.fluentd.org/quickstart/life-of-a-fluentd-event
Feel free to ask any questions using GitHub Issues.