Running temporary Home-Assistant on my laptop

by kalle | Jun 2, 2025 | Hacking, Home-Assistant

Wanted to experiment a bit with Home-Assistant while travelling. And wanted to be able to run as much as possibly locally on the laptop instead of connecting to my home setup since network connectivity is not always reliable.

So here is a short summary how I set it up.

Docker Desktop

I already had Docker Desktop setup with a free Docker Personal account. If you do not have it setup already, download and install it.

HomeAssistant and MQTT

I found these two articles; Installing Docker, Home Assistant and Portainer on Ubuntu Linux and Configuring the Mosquitto MQTT Docker container for use with Home Assistant but they are dedicated to run Docker on Linux and since my laptop is a Mac I had to do some modifications.

Home Assistant

Create a folder on your laptop. I called mine home-assistant and then a number of subfolders in it:

mkdir home-assistant
cd home-assistant
mkdir homeassistant
mkdir homeassistant/config

Then run code docker-compose.yml and add

version: '3.0'
services:
  homeassistant:
    container_name: homeassistant
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
    volumes:
      - ./homeassistant/config:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    ports:
      - 8123:8123

Mosquitto

Optionally if you want to run Mosquitto for MQTT

mkdir mosquitto
mkdir mosquitto/data  
mkdir mosquitto/logmkdir mosquitto/config

Then run code mosquitto/config/mosquitto.conf and add

persistence true
persistence_location /mosquitto/data/
log_dest file /mosquitto/log/mosquitto.log
password_file /mosquitto/password_file

And add to docker-compose.yml

  mosquitto:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto
    container_name: mosquitto
    volumes:
      - ./mosquitto:/mosquitto
      - ./mosquitto/data:/mosquitto/data
      - ./mosquitto/log:/mosquitto/log
    ports:
      - 1883:1883
      - 9001:9001    

Start container/s

Then start the the container or containers with docker compose like

docker-compose up -d

Then visit localhost:8123 to create account and start using Home-Assistant

Alternatives to get Nexa support in Home Assistent

by kalle | Apr 28, 2024 | Hacking, Home-Assistant

I found the OpenMQTTGateway project and got really interested since it can open up for a lot of interesting integrations to Home Assistant. I bought a LilyGo to start experimenting and could get it to read 433Mhz devices like Nexa. All this is possible due to the RTL_433_ESP library.

I wanted also to be able to write to the devices since I have several power plugs that use Nexa. That is not possible with just the LilyGo and the radio module on it. With the STX882 it should be possible to transmit. So I bought both a STX882 and a SRX882. This page describes how to connect these to a ESP32 or NodeMCU.

Have not yet tried to make the full setup and connect everything. Will update this post once I have tried that.