I've spent years in the home automation space. My HA setup is very primitive/small compared to others I've seen - I only have a couple dozen smart devices at this time, while some people on the user groups I frequent have ecosystems with hundreds of devices or more.

I suppose it was 2014 or 2015 when I got started, using the Wink hub and ecosystem that was available at the time. In 2020, I punted Wink in favor of the Hubitat hub and ecosystem which, for the most part, did not require a cloud (i.e. internet) connection and offered local control; a feature that Wink sorely lacked.

In 2023 (maybe earlier, maybe later), I discovered the Home Assistant (HASS) solution, which is pretty much a software-only solution, meaning one still needed a way to get commands from hass to the smart devices, so I used an extension that allowed hass to piggyback onto Hubitat and utilize Hubitat's radios to get the signals to the devices.

This setup - coupled with the complexity inherently baked into Hubitat from the get-go - began getting more and more cumbersome as time went on, to the point that attempts to onboard smart bulbs actually began failing. I decided it was time to get Hubitat out of the loop, so I procured a USB “Zigbee Coordinator”, which I believe is just fancy-speak for “radio”, and strapped that puppy directly to the system where my hass software was running. I then went about moving my smart devices off of Hubitat and onto hass, and I haven't looked back.

This section of the documentation is dedicated to centralizing all the pertinent information I've acquired regarding Home Assistant. As there are many flavors of hass and ways by which it can be run, I will caveat that all of this information is geared towards the way I run it, which is running the HAOS system within a VM. Some of the stuff I document here may be relevant when running other flavors of hass or on different types of hardware, while some of this stuff may likely be useless in those scenarios.

Attempts to hit HAOS via a reverse proxy will fail with a code 400 unless some manual tweaking is done to the configuration file:

At the console command prompt, type login to get to a real shell.

Access the directory where the configuration file can be found with cd /mnt/data/supervisor/homeassistant.

Using vi, edit the configuration.yaml file and add the following configuration (replacing xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address of the reverse proxy):

http:
   use_x_forwarded_for: true
   trusted_proxies:
     - xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Save the file and restart hass.