Container name hassio appears to be incorrect

[lnlp]

First a thanks for your IOTstack efforts.

By default hassio is a combination of a Home Assistant Docker container running on HassOS. It is available as downloadable (SD card) image from GitHub via https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/. Included in hassio's UI is the possibility to download add-ons from the hassio add-on store.

If I understand correctly IOTstack's Home Assistant Docker container is not hassio.
If so then the container name 'hassio' is very confusing and should therefore be renamed to 'homeassistant' instead.

According to https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/ and
https://github.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/blob/master/hassio_install.sh
it should be possible to do an alternative install of hassio on Raspbian.
But because IOTstack's Home Assistant container has the standard Home Assistant UI and not hassio's UI (no add-on store in menu) my assumption is that IOTstack currently does not use hassio.

[gcgarner]

Hi, you are correct. The container was home assistant not hassio. I corrected this last night. The new version has a separate installation for hassio and it works with its own service

[lnlp]

Thanks, I noticed it on the Wiki hours after you updated it.

I have now installed the new version (real hassio) which now consists of 3 containers.
It is nice to see a full hassio implementation, but as hassio runs on top of Alpine Linux which adds an extra OS layer (?) this will probably also use more resources.

I like IOTstack's use of ./volumes where data from each container is externally stored in a central location. Because the new hassio is not managed by IOTstack this is no longer the case.
Do you know how the same construct can be implemented for hassio and its add-on containers?

There is an overlap of services available in IOTstack and add-ons available in hassio (add-on store). For instance, Grafana an Mosquitto are available in IOTstack but are also available as add-on in hassio. Some of those add-ons appear to be placed in their own containers.
What are the pros and cons of each? Any tips or best practices for how to best handle this?

[gcgarner]

There is an option for specifying the "volumes" directory for hassio. The default is somewhere in /usr/share/hassio I think. The installer documentation is here

I literally only heard about hassio when a community member submitted "home assistant" as a pull request. I'm going to have to play around with the utility to find out more about it.

In terms of the overlap, this will come down to the user. One person may only want an mqtt server and influxdb on one Pi and run the other services on a different device. You may not want the "bulk" of hassio. However if you want hassio anyways then install the services you want inside it and let hassio manage everything for you. I think managing your own stack gives you slightly more flexibility even if is does require you to be a little more hands on.

Personally I do like the openness of my stack, you can see exactly what is installed and where, nothing is hidden.

There is another dilema for me regarding changing the data volume, hassio's documentation is geared to their layout, if I change it then it may confuse a very novice user because they cant find what is in the support documentation. I'm already preparing to make a wiki entry on how to reset your password for example.

[lnlp]

Thanks. I will have a look at that documentation.

In terms of overlap, I meant all on a single device (otherwise there would be no need to use IOTstack for installing hassio). When having installed IOTstack and having hassio installed via IOTstack's menu, you for instance have the option to install Mosquitto as service in IOTstack or install Mosquitto as an add-on in hassio. Both result in a separate Docker container running Mosquitto.
My question regarding pros and cons, tips and best practices was about that. Why use one over the other and what are the practical implications/differences?

Personally I do like the openness of my stack, you can see exactly what is installed and where, nothing is hidden.

Exactly my thoughts. 🙂

[gcgarner]

The advantages of hassio are that you get a polished integrated environment to work in. It has quite a lot of containers. The downside looks like it takes quite a while to setup.

The advantage of IOTstack is that it has rapid deployment and you can hack it to what you need. The major downside is you need to learn a little bit about docker along the way.

Both achieve roughly the same goal. They pull a docker image and start/manage it. The only thing that you cant do is run two containers that do the same thing. There will be a port conflict and one of the services will fail.

My advice is that if you are using hassio anyways rather use their versions of the containers, you get the benefit of their management tools. You can consider using the hassio image as well

[lnlp]

You can consider using the hassio image as well

I had hassio installed from their SD card image just before I discovered IOTstack, but I like the benefit of having a full Raspbian (Lite) host OS instead of a barebones Linux version.

[gcgarner]

glad i could help