Home Assistant App: SSH & Claude Code Terminal

This app allows you to log in to your Home Assistant instance using SSH or Web Terminal, with Claude Code pre-installed for AI-assisted Home Assistant configuration.

About

This app allows you to log in to your Home Assistant instance using SSH or a Web Terminal, giving you access to your folders and also includes a command-line tool to do things like restart, update, and check your instance.

This fork includes Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant that can help you optimize your Home Assistant configuration, write automations, and troubleshoot issues directly from the terminal.

Based on the Advanced SSH & Web Terminal app by the Home Assistant Community app project.

📚 Read the full app documentation

WARNING

The advanced SSH & Web Terminal app is very powerful and gives you access to almost all tools and hardware of your system.

While this app is created and maintained with care and with security in mind, in the wrong or inexperienced hands, it could damage your system.

Features

This app, of course, provides an SSH server, based on OpenSSH and a web-based Terminal (which can be included in your Home Assistant frontend) as well. Additionally, it comes out of the box with the following:

• Access your command line right from the Home Assistant frontend!
• A secure default configuration of SSH:
  • Only allows login by the configured user, even if more users are created.
  • Only uses known secure ciphers and algorithms.
  • Limits login attempts to hold off brute-force attacks better.
  • Many more security tweaks, this app passes all ssh-audit checks without warnings!
• Comes with an SSH compatibility mode option to allow older clients to connect.
• Support for Mosh allowing roaming and supports intermittent connectivity.
• SFTP support is disabled by default but is user configurable.
• Compatible if Home Assistant was installed via the generic Linux installer.
• Username is configurable, so root is no longer mandatory.
• Persists custom SSH client settings & keys between app restarts
• Log levels for allowing you to triage issues easier.
• Hardware access to your audio, uart/serial devices and GPIO pins.
• Runs with more privileges, allowing you to debug and test more situations.
• Has access to the dbus of the host system.
• Has the option to access the Docker instance running on the host system.
• Runs on host level network, allowing you to open ports or run little daemons.
• Have custom Alpine packages installed on start. This allows you to install your favorite tools, which will be available every single time you log in.
• Execute custom commands on app start so that you can customize the shell to your likings.
• ZSH as its default shell. Easier to use for the beginner, more advanced for the more experienced user. It even comes preloaded with "Oh My ZSH", with some plugins enabled as well.
• Contains a sensible set of tools right out of the box: curl, Wget, RSync, GIT, Nmap, Mosquitto client, MariaDB/MySQL client, Awake ("wake on LAN"), Nano, Vim, tmux, and a bunch commonly used networking tools.
• Claude Code pre-installed for AI-assisted Home Assistant configuration and automation development.
• yamllint included for validating YAML configuration files.

Installation

This app is not part of the official Home Assistant app repository. To install it, you need to add this repository as a custom repository:

1. Open your Home Assistant instance
2. Navigate to Settings → Apps → Install App
3. Click the menu (three dots) in the top right corner
4. Select Repositories
5. Add the following URL:

   https://github.com/jantimon/ha-addon-ssh
   

6. Click Add and then Close
7. Refresh the page and find "SSH & Claude Code Terminal" in the app store
8. Click Install

After installation, configure your username and password/SSH keys, then start the app.

Using Claude Code

Claude Code starts automatically when you open the terminal, landing you directly in your Home Assistant configuration directory (/homeassistant).

1. Open the terminal (via SSH or Web Terminal in the sidebar)
2. Claude Code launches automatically
3. On first use, run /login to authenticate via your browser
4. Start asking questions about your Home Assistant configuration

Key features:

• Auto-starts in /homeassistant directory
• Pre-configured permissions for HA files and commands
• ha-reload command for instant YAML hot-reload (no restart needed)
• Status line shows HA version, model, and context usage
• Built-in /homeassistant-reload skill for intelligent config reloading

Support

Got questions?

You have several options to get them answered:

• The Home Assistant Community Apps Discord chat server for app support and feature requests.
• The Home Assistant Discord chat server for general Home Assistant discussions and questions.
• The Home Assistant Community Forum.
• Join the Reddit subreddit in /r/homeassistant

You could also open an issue here GitHub.

Development

This project uses pixi for developer tooling.

Format all files (markdown, shell scripts, Python):

pixi run fmt

Check formatting without writing changes:

pixi run fmt-check

You can also format individually: pixi run fmt-md, pixi run fmt-sh, pixi run fmt-py.

Contributing

This is an active open-source project. We are always open to people who want to use the code or contribute to it.

We have set up a separate document containing our contribution guidelines.

Thank you for being involved! 😍

Authors & contributors

The original setup of this repository is by Franck Nijhof.

For a full list of all authors and contributors, check the contributors page.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2017-2026 Franck Nijhof

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.