Installing Home assistant on Ubuntu server

This post is meant to explain my installation process of home assistant on ubuntu server, using kvm

You can follow the guide from

Ideally you just follow the guide here, I will add some information that was important to me

1. Network configuration

Dpending on your OS, you will have a different method of managing your networks. Some use network-manager, some NetworkManager, some systemd-networkd and so on. Either find it out by trying or read (here)[https://askubuntu.com/questions/1031439/am-i-running-networkmanager-or-networkd] to get a check which one. Depending on that, you have to configure a bridge on top of your current network interface that homeassistant can connect to. I have added a USB to ethernet adapter to my computer, that way I have two interfaces. My main interface is enp4s0 and the USB one is enx00133b9c3c5b. You don't need that, but its nicer to have the bridge and the rest of the network separated. That way, if you mess something up, its messed up on an interface that is not needed for your main internet on the machine.
I will describe configuration of a bridge for networkd and network-manager

a. Netplan/ networkd

Ubuntu server uses netplan (systemd-networkd) as its network manager
To add a brigde, you have to first edit the permissions and then add some stuff to the following file:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml

After configuration, the file should have your ethernet devices at the top (for me its two, for you it can be only one) and then the bridge at the bottom

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp4s0:
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp6: true
    enx00133b9c3c5b:
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp6: true
  bridges:
    br0:
      dhcp4: true
      interfaces:
        - enx00133b9c3c5b
      macaddress: "a8:5e:45:e5:de:94"
      parameters:
        stp: true

• netplan try will show probable issues with the network configuration. I had to sudo apt install openvswitch-switch as well
• add a new network file

<network>
    <name>bridged-network</name>
    <forward mode="bridge" />
    <bridge name="br0" />
</network>

b. Network-manager

I switched to Debian recently and had to do the configuration again, using network-manager. Followed the guide here.
I used brctl to control the bridge and needed a file /etc/network/interfaces.d/br0 that I configured as followed:

## static ip config file for br0 ##
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
	address 192.168.0.5
	broadcast 192.168.0.255
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	gateway 192.168.0.1
	# If the resolvconf package is installed, you should not edit 
        # the resolv.conf configuration file manually. Set name server here
        #dns-nameservers 192.168.2.254
        # If you have muliple interfaces such as eth0 and eth1
        # bridge_ports eth0 eth1  
	bridge_ports enx00133b9c3c5b
	bridge_stp on      # disable Spanning Tree Protocol
        bridge_waitport 0    # no delay before a port becomes available
        bridge_fd 0          # no forwarding delay

After this, you have to enable forwarding of ports so have to add something to the docker configuration. You can find it in the guide I linked first in this post.

2. Start VM

I created a script that I can run, called create-haos.sh

virt-install --import --name hass \
--memory 4096 --vcpus 4 --cpu host \
--disk /path/to/haos_ova-11.2.qcow2,format=qcow2,bus=virtio \
--network bridge=br0,model=virtio \
--osinfo detect=on,require=off \
--graphics none \
--noautoconsole \
--boot uefi

Sadly I was not able to create the vm with my normal user, so I had to use sudo. Not ideal, but not too bad.

If you did everything correctly, homeassistant should turn up in your router with an IP and you should be able to connect to it