I thought I would write up some new changes I have made to the house related to my Docker setup. Recently, I’ve added some really neat new containers to my home set up and have had some people ask me for my Docker-Compose file so this post is to answer those queries.

MuxiMux

This has been an awesome little enhancement for me. With all the docker containers out there I have been rolling out and all of their various web UIs, I was looking for an easy way to build a nice jump page for the house. Enter MuxiMux.

This handy little container runs a nginx reverse proxy service alongside a LAMP install to provide a dead simple interface for grouping all of your Web UIs in the house. The container works as an iFrame so as you click the various applications, you will see a tabbed interface up above where session state is maintained allowing you to easily jump back and forth between apps. You can see the screen shots below. The first is the main dashboard and subsequent ones are the tabbed interfaces of some of my Web UIs. One caveat: for some self signed SSL websites like Unifi, I had to install this extension to prevent errors.

Grafana and InfluxDB

These next two containers were rolled out to really juice up my Home Assistant installation. InfluxDB is now the external database I am using for all of my Home Assistant related activities and Grafana is set up to take advantage of that database and produce beautiful charts. Shout out to Phil Hawthorne and @arsaboo for providing excellent resources to help with this migration and deployment. My first charting exercise was for my Solar Production and Consumption. Graphing data from the PowerWall and merging it with Cloud data from Dark Sky gave me the nice chart below. Unlike the Tesla native app, I can run reports for almost ANY time period which is awesome. Nightly, I tweet this graph out on the Smart Home BearStoneHA account.

ESPHomeYaml

This is the newest container to my Smart Home. Otto Winter has done an AMAZING job creating an YAML based IDE for ESP development. Previously, I have been using ESPEASY for my DIY sensors but now will be transitioning over over ESPHOMEYAML. I haven’t had much time to experiment with it yet but the WebUI was super easy to deploy and bring into my environment.

Enhancements to Docker-Compose:

Some really nice enhancements to my Docker-Compose.yaml file came from picking through Brian Hanifin’s example. Things like HealthChecks, timed waits and ordered startups are now in place. For instance, Home Assistant patiently waits for the InfluxDB to be started and ready to go before starting up and HomeBridge and Dasher wait for Home Assistant to complete start up before bringing those services online. Makes for a much more predictable and stable Docker Automation setup.

Those are some of the major new containers I have added to my setup. On the Todo List is to retire the HomeBridge container and migrate HomeKit functionality to Home Assistant proper. That will happen sometime this summer most likely. I might blog about it if there is some interest in that.

In the meantime, Happy Automating!

–Carlo