confusing_ha_terms
Confusing HA terms
Home Automation, Home Assistant, Hassio, HassOS, HA, Hass, WTF?
Home Automation
There are a lot of systems that offer Home Automation capabilities, Home Assistant is just on of them.
Other popular systems in this space are:
And many many many more, as a base part of their core they allow you control/moitor your smart home or make your dumb home smarter.
Home Assistant
Let's start with an easy one.
Home Assistant is the automation platform (software) that we all run. This is where you have your integrations, do automations and create awesome Lovelace views.
Some popular abbrevations of Home Assistant:
Home Assistant (HA)
Home Assistant (Hass)
To add to the confusion, HA is also used as an abbrevation for "Home Automation" so... sorry?
More information about Home Assistant
Hassio / Hass.io
Now things can get a little tricky.
Hassio is not Home Assistant, and Home Assistant is not Hassio.
Hassio is a way of installing Home Assistant (similar to pip install homeassistant and docker).
When you use one of the Hassio installers (HassOS/Generic linux) you get a set of docker containers in addition to the main part (Home Assistant)
Base set of containers for Hassio:
Home Assistant
Hassio Supervisor
DNS
Some key aspects:
Every Hassio installation uses Docker.
Hassio can be installed on any linux OS.
Hassio does not have automations
Hassio does not have integrations
The add-on store is only available if you installed Home Assistant with Hassio.
HassOS
HassOS is a OS based on buildroot, that ships with Hassio (and therefore also Home Assistant).
There are images available for many boards, as well as hypervisors.
Hassbian
Bonus round.
Hassbian was the first OS that came with Home Assistant pre installed in a python venv., it is (was) a customized version of Raspbian lite.
Compararable to
Part | comparable to |
Home Assistant | Word, Excel, Chrome (Software) |
Hassio | Office, Adobe (Suites of software) |
HassOS / Hassbian | Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu (OS (Operating Systems)) |
One last thing
You can add some stuff to your system.
Add-ons
Wait... What now?
Add-ons are (for the most part) pre exsisting software wrapped in a spesial way so Hassio know how to run them. These are all standalone containers (docker lingo), and as noted earlier Add-ons are only available on Hassio installations.
Although the add-ons are only available for Hassio installation, these (again, for the most part) are "just" wrappers for software you can install manually if Hassio is not your cup of tea.
NB!: This is not integrations
More information about Add-ons and some examples of ones
Integrations
Flavor with sparkels and rainbows.
Integrations allow you to add additional functions/data to your Home Assistant installation. Every Installation of Home Assistant have integrations, this is the things you add to your configuration.yaml and/or in the UI of Home Assistant under "Integrations"
Earlier this was called "Components", cummunity managed integrations are still refered to as custom_component(s).
NB!: This is not add-ons
A list of Integrations in Home Assistant
Compararable to
Part | comparable to |
Add-ons | Word, Excel, Chrome (Software) |
Integrations | I don't know, the save/print function in Word maybe? |
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