Prerequisite: Proxmox

Home Assistant OS (HAOS) is a dedicated operating system designed to run Home Assistant, which is a privacy-focused, all-in-one solution that allows you set up and manage your smart home devices like lights, sensors and smart plugs without the need for subscriptions or cloud connections.

This page covers setting up HAOS as a virtual machine (VM) on Proxmox.

Create the HAOS VM

HAOS does not use an installer ISO like other operating systems. Instead, you normally download a pre-built disk image that you either write directly to the target boot disk, or alternatively, import into a VM in our case.

Because of this, the easiest way to set up HAOS on Proxmox is to use the Home Assistant OS Helper Script. This script automatically creates a VM with 2 vCPUs & 4GB RAM, downloads and imports the HAOS disk image, and configures the necessary settings for you automatically.

To do this, navigate to your Proxmox server’s web UI, click on your server node, then go to the Shell tab, then paste and run the command below to execute the script:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"

• You will first see a prompt asking you to confirm the creation of a new VM. Ensure Yes is selected, then press Enter to proceed.
• The next prompt will ask if you want to use default settings. Again, ensure Yes is selected, then press Enter.
• The next prompt will ask if you want to keep the downloaded HAOS image after the installation is complete. Use the arrow keys to highlight No and then press Enter.

Once the script completes, you will see the new HAOS VM listed under your server node in the Proxmox web UI. This VM should already be running and will be already configured to start automatically.

Select the new VM from the list, click on the Console tab, and you should see the HAOS boot screen, which should show the IP address assigned to the VM once it has completed booting up.

You can now access Home Assistant by navigating to http://<ip-address>:8123 in your web browser, where <ip-address> is the IP address shown on the VM’s boot screen.

Set Up and Configure Home Assistant

After navigating to the Home Assistant web UI, select Create My Smart Home. You will be prompted to create a new user account for accessing the Home Assistant dashboard. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the initial setup.

Set Static IP Address

After completing the initial setup, my first recommendation is to give your Home Assistant instance a static IP address to ensure it remains reachable at the same address over time.

To do this, navigate to Settings > System > Network in the Home Assistant web UI. Under Configure Network Interfaces, click on IPv4 and select Static. Change the address in the IP Address field to your desired static IP address, then click Save.

Using Home Assistant

Home Assistant has a ton of functionality, more than we can get into here. Smart Home Solver has a great beginner’s guide video below that will help you hit the ground running:

Set Up Automatic Backups

After you get Home Assistant set up the way you want it, my next recommendation is to set up automatic backups for your Home Assistant instance to ensure you can restore your configuration in case of any issues later down the road.

To do this, navigate to Settings > System > Backups in the Home Assistant web UI. Click on Set Up Backups. You will be shown an encryption key, make sure to save this somewhere safe! Go ahead and also download the emergency kit file and save it somewhere safe as well, then click Next.

On the next screen, choose Recommended for the backup type.

You now have daily automatic backups scheduled, but these are stored locally within the HAOS VM itself. You can download a copy of one of your backups by navigating to Settings > System > Backups, then under My Backups, click on Show All Backups, then click the ⋮ button on the latest backup job and choose Download. This will download the backup file to your computer so you can store it somewhere safe.

However, we can take this a step further if you previously set up a TrueNAS VM.

Store Backups on TrueNAS

To do this, navigate to Settings > System > Storage in the Home Assistant web UI. Under Network Storage, click on Add Network Storage:

• Give a name to the storage config (for example: TrueNAS).
• For Usage, choose Backup.
• In the Server field, enter the static IP address of your TrueNAS VM you configured earlier.
• For Protocol, choose Samba/Windows (CIFS).
• For Share, enter the name of the SMB share you created earlier in TrueNAS. You can confirm this by navigating to Shares > Windows (SMB) Shares in the TrueNAS web UI and checking the Name field of the share you created.
  • Entering just the name of the share will result in Home Assistant saving the backup files to the root level of the share. If you want to save the backups to a specific folder within the share, you can append the path after the share name (for example: <share-name>/Backups/HomeAssistant).
• Enter the username and password of the user you created earlier in TrueNAS for accessing the SMB share.
• Click Connect.
• Next, navigate to Settings > System > Backups in the Home Assistant web UI.
• Under Backup Settings, click on Local backup only to open the Locations config for your backup settings.
• Here, you should see both options: This System and TrueNAS (or whatever you named your network storage config).
• Click the slider next to your network storage config to enable it, then optionally disable This System so that the backup files are only stored on your TrueNAS storage.
• Test this out by navigating to Settings > System > Backups, then in the lower-right corner, click on Backup Now, then select Automatic Backup.
• After the backup job completes, navigate to your TrueNAS SMB share to confirm that the backup file has been saved there successfully.

Next Steps