hai

I’m running HAOS and Docker in two different VMs on Proxmox, and it’s working fine for me so far.

So, I think I've mentioned this in another reply, but, I have a very minimal setup. It's a RPi4 as the main device, Starlink as the ISP (CGNAT; no port-forwarding), and now Tailscale as the only way to access outside of my LAN. I agree that HAOS meets it's primary job of running Home Assistant. Although, I don't have the option to run Proxmox (at least I've never seen anyone run Proxmox on an RPi) and also have a massive music library (and soon a large movie and TV show collection, once I rip all of those DVDs) so I really only need to run a few things:

• A dashboard to make accessing the services easier for the family.
• A reverse proxy to handle subpaths (this used to be Cloudflare Tunnels with subdomains and NPM with subpaths, now it's just Nginx).
• Tailscale (to expose services and run a VPN to get past the CGNAT).
• Jellyfin (for TV shows and movies).
• A forked version of Goinc (I have a fork with LDAP support, there's an open pull request for it, but it needs a little extra work; this wasn't ran on HA).
• Something to run LDAP authentication.
• Some Home Automation software (was Home Assistant, I migth switch to something else).

Edit: I also run Vaultwarden.

I've really scaled things back since previous self-hosting journeys, and when I first started with HAOS there was even less going on, and really I need things to just work. I'm learning now that my mistake was assuming that HAOS add-ons are supposed to behave just like a Docker container, they're not. I've learned the hard way, but, I still don't love HA's attitude towards something that are deemed "complex," such as sub-paths and alternative authentication providers.

I'm on RPi OS now.

Still no subpaths, changing default authentication providers, and there can still be workarounds that feel hackish (I've used HA is a container before) the difference is that you'll do less in Home Assistant, so you avoid them as much as possible.

Strip prefix won’t work if the frontend expects to find paths at absolute locations. You would need to patch the html, css and js on the fly, which is somewhere between ugly and (almost) impossible.

This is what I've seen would be the only "feasible" way of getting HA to work behind a subpath, in my opinion this only works for very small application though (not something as complex as Home Assistant).

I prefer docker because it is comfortable for me and I run all my services on one server, but it is indeed a bit less easy.

Reading all of these replying I'm starting to think that maybe my problem was assuming that because add-ons are Docker container they should be treated as such.

Yeah, that's why I finally ditched it, (I said this in another reply) but it was intended to be something the family could figure out if I wasn't available or something did happen to me. There's no way they could figure all of that out, doubly so with everything that felt "hackish" just to get Home Assistant and Jellyfin running.

I'd rather them have a usable experience now, that I setup with the least amount of hacks and cloud services. I know it's kinda weird and an unhappy reason, but it also (hopefully) will make my life easier.

Yes and no. If you want a really simple setup HAOS add-ons are amazing, but as soon as you want to run something someone else hasn't created a container for you're stuck doing extra work than just writing a Dockerfile or docker-compose. Plus, you can't setup networks between them and (as mentioned in the original post) sharing drives can be hackish as well.

The (grim) reason had I tried HAOS was because of the promise of something really simple that my family could figure out if something ever happened to me.

I'm (currently) on Raspberry Pi OS (as I need something that "just works"). Home Assistant is running in Docker like everything else.

A lot of apps use hard coded paths, so using a subdomain per app makes it much easier to use them all. Traefik has middleware, including stripPrefix, which allow you to strip a path prefix before forwarding the path to the app, though - have you tried that approach?

I should've mentioned this, but I'm using Nginx (I really enjoy the simplicity of just having to add a section to a file whenever I want to add something). Before running HAOS I was running RPIOS again and used Traefik, it worked (but felt like a lot more work to setup than just a plain Nginx setup).

Edit: I forgot to mention, but there are things like stripPrefix for Nginx, I'm going to look into them. Although, this is what I meant, when you start to do things that are "advanced" with Home Assistant they turn into "hacks," and the barrier for advanced things feels a lot lower than with other self-hosted services (and I get that Home Assistant is very complex under the hood, it's just frustrating).

I am a happy openHAB user for 5+ years. Have you considered switching to see if you like it?

I actually have considered it, and I'm still thinking about it.

I run stuff locally and can connect over VPN to my home and operate as if I am inside the home. I have not looked into these other cloudflare tunnels or tail scale as I don’t think it would provide any advantage to my current setup.

I have a strange setup. My ISP is Starlink (so I'm behind a CGNAT), meaning I kinda need another service to access them outside the network, but (as mentioned) I mainly host for my family who wouldn't know how to work another app or VPN.

They added a casual game mode, that I think is offline.

So, it's an app for Ubuntu Pro. Just what I needed.

I think it’s more that there really isn’t a need for this. If I’m not sure what a tab is I can always click on it. Chromium got this a while back and (even with minimal exposure to Chromium) I didn’t like it, it weirdly felt annoying and unnecessary.

All good! And yeah, supper annoying that companies are able to do this and get away with it.