It’s been a while since I’ve worked on my Home Assistant setup. I had it running on Hyper-V for a stretch, but over time, it got messy. Updates piled up, things stopped making sense, and I avoided touching it. Now I’m starting over with a Docker setup on Ubuntu Server — cleaner, simpler, and hopefully easier to manage.
This post is mostly a log for myself, but maybe it helps someone else who’s either returning to Home Assistant or starting fresh..
What is Home Assistant?
For those of you that don’t know what Home Assistant is, it’s a platform that brings together your smart home devices and services into one place, allowing you to control them from a single interface. It gives you the freedom of local control and does not lock you into an ecosystem platform, like Apple HomeKit or Google Home.
It enables an infinite amount of combinations for making your home smarter. I’ve seen some really cool integrations where you can use adapters to tell you when to water your plants or linking your cameras to a LLM for funny captions.
Why I Stepped Away
There wasn’t a dramatic failure. The system kept running, but it was showing its age. I built it on Hyper-V during a different season, and after a while, it felt more patched together than planned. Updates started to pile up, and I knew I’d eventually need to reset things to keep going forward.
I’ve put it off long enough. It’s time to rebuild it properly.
Why I’m Coming Back
I still like the idea of having a smart home, but I care more about it being stable than clever. I want things that just work. Lights that know when to turn off, sensors that notify me only when it matters, a dashboard that feels like part of the home.
This time, I want to build the system more intentionally. Better structure. More notes. Less friction.
My Starting Plan
Rebuild environment from scratch
- Ubuntu Server LTS – I have a micro PC stood up now that I’m running this site in with a Docker container. I’m weighing whether or not to use the same box or spin up a second one to keep things clean.
- Docker-based Home Assistant (supervised or core)
- Map out persistent volumes for backups
- Rebuild slowly, integration by integration
Initial goals
- Reliable lighting automations
- A clean dashboard that my wife will maybe use
- Basic presence detection
- Routines for things like bedtime and away mode
- A foundation I can actually build on
Lessons from last time
- Don’t install things just because I can
- Clean naming matters more than I thought (sensors and entities with some rooms having 4 smart lights, that gets crazy fast)
- Automations should simplify life, not complicate it
- Backups are useful, but they should not be the main safety net
I’m not trying to automate my entire house. I just want small wins that bring peace and flow to the day. That means being honest about what matters, being patient when things don’t work, and keeping it simple where I can. Some of my smart devices are beginning to show their age and have not historically had the best integrations with Home Assistant (even with community plugins), so I’m not going to push too hard on those if they take a lot of work to connect — initally.
If you’re thinking about starting over, it might not be a step backward. It might be the only way forward that actually feels right.