How to install Home Assistant Supervisor on Debian Server

3 min readApr 22, 2021

I have done this on a Virtual Box VM, but the steps will be more of less similar if you are going on a standalone machine, Rasberry PI or an Intel NUC

As of April 2020 the latest official support of Home Assistant Supervisor is Debian 10 (Buster)

Prerequisites

Latest version of VirtualBox
Active intenet connection

Create a virtual machine on VirtualBox with these specs

2 GB Ram
8 GB HDD (Minimum)
Check Enable EFI (System -> Motherboard
Select Bridged Adapter (On Network tab)

Download Debian

Click here to download Debian 10 (amd64 netinstall IOS)

Install Debian on VirtualBox

Attach the downloaded IOS file to IDE Secondary Device 0

Start the VM. You will be greeted with Debian installer

Select your desired installation method and proceed till Software selection screen

Select only SSH server as we are trying to create a Debian server we don’t need desktop environment.
Complete the installation and boot up the VM

Setup remote SSH for root user: (Optional)

By default Debian doesn’t allow us to do SSH for root user

On the VM login into the root user
Edit ssh_config

# nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

3. Update

FROM:
#PermitRootLogin prohibit-password
TO:
PermitRootLogin yes

4. Restart SSH server

# /etc/init.d/ssh restart
[ ok ] Restarting ssh (via systemctl): ssh.service.

This will enable us to SSH into the root user

Install Docker on Debian

Login into the terminal as root user once the systems startsup. If you have enabled SSH remote access you will also be able to SSH into the machine.

Make sure you login to the root user

// Install required dependencies 
# apt install sudo curl jq network-manager htop// Install docker
# sudo apt-get update# sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release# curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg# echo \
  "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null# sudo apt-get update# sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
// Check if docker is successfully installed
# sudo docker run hello-world

You show see the message Hello from Docker!. Now we are ready to install Supervisor

Install Home Assistant Supervisor

# curl -Lo installer.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/master/installer.sh# bash installer.sh// Wait until you see this message[info] Home Assistant supervised is now installed
[info] First setup will take some time, when it's ready you can reach it here:
[info] http://<IP_ADDRESS>:8123

Once you see the above message wait for 5 mins and open the IP address. If will take longer if your internet connection is poor.

For geeks to know what is really happening during that 5 mins. Continuously do docker ps. You will see that homeassistant daemon creating docker containers one by one.

You will now have Home Assistant Supervisor up and running on a Debian Server.