While developing Home Assistant we realized that a lot of users will end up running many different applications together. You want to use Mosquitto as your MQTT broker, you want Homebridge to integrate HomeKit and you want to use Samba so that you can easily edit your configuration from your main computer.

To make all these tasks a lot easier Fredrik Lindqvist introduced Hassbian for the Raspberry Pi: a flavor of the Raspbian operating system that automatically installs Home Assistant and allows for easy installation of supporting applications for Home Assistant. However, after installation of Home Assistant and apps you were on your own. Future upgrades would require manual work and there was no longer any handholding. On top of that there was the challenge of configuring all these extra applications.

So I started a couple of months ago on a mission to come up with a solution for users to easily manage their Home Assistant server and related applications. Meet hass.io.

Hass.io is a new way of running Home Assistant based on Docker and ResinOS. The core part of the system is the hass.io supervisor. The supervisor is in control of your system and is able to launch and update Home Assistant and any of the applications that you will need.

Any application that you want to run can be added via an add-on. Hass.io will come with a few built-in add-ons to share your config using Samba, run Mosquitto and automatically generate or renew your Let’s Encrypt certificates.

We also made it very easy to create your own add-ons using Dockerfiles. Hass.io will also allow you to share repositories of add-ons with the community. That way, having someone use your new application that works on Home Assistant is as easy as having them install an add-on from your repository!

The beta starts today and we have images available for Raspberry Pi and an installation script to get it running on an i386 or amd64 linux server.

Note that this is a beta. We have been running this for a while and it’s stable. However there might still be some rough edges. Please report any issues back to us here on the forums.

Once we consider this good enough we’ll go for a mainstream release. Because we don’t want the public to use this yet, the documentation is not linked yet from our homepage: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/.

Big thanks to @balloob for helping me with the configuration panel and all the administrative stuff.

How you can help:

Note: Hass.io currently can be controlled by anyone who has access to your Home Assistant instance. Since we support custom add-ons, this means that anyone with access can run any application on your machine. Do not connect your hass.io instances to the internet. This will be addressed in a future release.