Home Assistant Operating System (formerly HassOS) is an operating system optimized for hosting Home Assistant and its Add-ons.
Home Assistant Operating System uses Docker as Container engine. It by default deploys the Home Assistant Supervisor as a container. Home Assistant Supervisor in turn uses the Docker container engine to control Home Assistant Core and Add-Ons in separate containers. Home Assistant Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu. It is built using buildroot and it is optimized for running Home Assistant, especially on single board compute (SBC) devices like the Pi, ODROID, NUC and Tinker Board (see supported hardware below).
- Lightweight and memory-efficient
- Minimized I/O
- Over The Air (OTA) updates
- Offline updates
- Modular using Docker
- Raspberry Pi
- Hardkernel ODROID
- Intel NUC
- Asus Tinker Board
- Virtual appliances
See the full list and specific models here
If you just want to use Home Assistant the official getting started guide and installation instructions take you through how to download Home Assistant Operating System and get it running on your machine.
If you're interested in finding out more about Home Assistant Operating System and how it works read on...
- Bootloader:
- Operating System:
- Buildroot LTS Linux
- File Systems:
- Container Platform:
- Docker Engine for running Home Assistant components in containers
- Updates:
- RAUC for Over The Air (OTA) and USB updates
- Security:
- AppArmor Linux kernel security module
If you don't have experience with these, embedded systems, buildroot or the build process for Linux distributions, then please read up on these topics. The rest of the documentation in this project is for developers and assumes you have experience with embedded systems or a strong understanding of the internal workings of operating systems.
All developer documentation is in the Documentation directory.