I largely agree with this, but (and this might be me being a little paranoid) I don’t really trust anyone to handle my data like that. I self-host as much as possible to get away from things beyond my control, I understand that this is an extremist view of things, but the only reason why I use Tailscale Funnel is because the family would either not know how to, or not want, to deal with a VPN like that.

You make some good points, I’ve said a few times now that I mistook Home Assistant add-ons as traditional Docker containers (which I’ve learned the hard way is flat out wrong, you know what they say about assumptions).

First subdomain. I think HA is completely right that proxy with a subpath is basically an anti-pattern that just makes things worse for you and is always a bad idea (with very few exceptions).

I don’t agree with the comment replying about how developers are lazy. That being said, I also wouldn’t call a subpath an anti-pattern, it’s not uncommon and I wouldn’t say that it is always a bad idea (they have some pros and cons on subdomains and it’s what my setup calls for).

As for your tunnel I don’t know how you’ve set it up and I haven’t used tailscale but them only allowing one domain sounds like a very arbitrary limit, is it something that costs money to add? I use NetBird which I selfhost on my VPS and from there tunnel into my much beefier home setup.

There’s an open feature request for subdomains, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere. I’m assuming that it must be how they handle SSL certificates.

As for authentication there are 10k plus contributors to Home Assistant yearly but very few bother to make authentication more streamlined. I would’ve loved OpenID/OAuth2 support natively but there are ways to do so with custom components and in the end I quite strongly feel that if the end-users of your smarthome setup (i.e. the wife and kids) need to login to Home Assistant then you’ve probably got more work to do. Remote controls which interact with HA handle the vast majority of manual interaction and I’ve dabbled with self-hosted voice interfaces for the more complex operations.

Yeah, I’ve seen the idea that Home Assistant shouldn’t be the part you interact with several times, but I don’t really know of any better things to handle this. None of us really love voice controls and I’ve toyed around with Google Home (but I think it’s absolute garbage and self-host to get away from companies like Google).

I just suspect you’re making things harder for yourself and maybe have a strange idea around how to selfhost in general?

Not my ideas that are strange, I’d love to have a traditional setup. I’ve mentioned it a few times in other replies, I just don’t want to be the “just look at my other replies” person, so here’s whats going on: Starlink is my ISP (CGNAT; I can’t port-forward), Tailscale is now my only way of accessing things off of my LAN (I didn’t mind Cloudflare Tunnels, but Cloudflare scares me and Jellyfin is a pretty important thing and supposedly if you want to stream video you’re not allowed/supposed to use Tunnels), my only device is an RPi4 (I’ve tried other devices, but I really love the simplicity of the Pi – and also don’t have many other devices that would work that good for self-hosting).

Again, I’d love to have a “normal” ISP (we live in the middle of no where) that lets me port-forward and is nice and something other than a Pi to host on, but this is what I’m stuck with.

Sorry if this came across as writing you on the nose, that’s not my intention.

It’s all good I get where you’re coming from, and I’m sure you understand what’s going on for me.

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).

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.

I really love Onnivore, but my only issue is that RSS feeds are mixed in with the things you add to it. That being said, they’ve had a few updates that make it a lot better.

I knew of the Gogs forking, but why was Gitea forked?

Yeah, I remember iSH being on TestFlight and just being blown away. Like what it could do on an iPhone 6S as an app.

The iTunes of eBooks.

Let me start by saying that if Beehaw would be missed for all of us, but I doubt people would move with it if it left ActivePub. That being said I’d recommend sticking with Lemmy, sure it doesn’t have all the features yet — but it’s still young (and is still growing).

My head would hit a metal chair.

I sit on the floor, despite a chair being there.

“If you could have one supper power what would it be?”

It’s Florida how do you expect to be able to force them to do anything?

I absolutely hate having my phone. Most people will tell me things in person, or at the very least to check my phone. Plus, I have an amazing music library, which is fantastic but raises the question of how does one properly keep track of so many files. The answer to both of these questions is my trusty iPod, it does the one thing I bought it to do: play music (and sometimes podcasts). I no longer need to worry about my family group chat while out on a walk, and it has a headphone jack (which is the only way that the thing is gonna play music, I do get rather worried that I’m gonna play something embarrassing when I’m using Bluetooth headphones on my phone).

TL;DR: I love my iPod.

I also wouldn’t sacrifice an SD card slot…