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Comment by demosthanos | Hacker News Reader

Can't do with docker or can't do as easily with docker as you can with HAOS? My understanding has been that everything can be done by just adding new containers or files, and it's worked for me thus far.

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If you're using things like USB Zigbee dongles, they can be a pain to pass through to the docker container, or just not possible at all on macOS.

HAOS uses docker to containerize everything, so it can’t be that difficult, and it really is not. Docker has a —-device flag for this purpose, udev makes it easy enough to assign stable names.

zigbee2mqtt makes things easier to establish the bridge. Running as a container, next to home assistant container.

Docker does not support USB/serial device passthrough on macOS https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot-and-support/faq...

macOS is not really a good OS for running a server anyway, and Docker Desktop is intended for development more than anything else.

Trust me it's not worth the effort to get USB passthrough for HAOS on Docker.

What do you mean by “HAOS on docker”. HAOS is a standalone complete Linux system with its own fully managed kernel, not meant to be containerized. It uses docker internally itself though and “pass through” works transparently.

If you’re talking about running home assistant in a docker container, sure you’re more on your own, but since official home assistant in HAOS must run in docker, none of this is terribly difficult to configure.

The dongles are usually exposed as tty devices and I’ve been running zigbee2mqtt and Zwavejs addons in docker containers for years with no issue. HAOS takes care of stable naming (based on default udev rules) out of the box.

Unlike system virtualization, there isn’t really anything that needs passing through, it’s a naming and permissions issue - the container just needs an appropriately permissioned dev node ideally with a stable name. If you are using official addons it is effectively zero-config, and if you’re not, sorry but I don’t find the configuration to ensure a dev node to be anything but straightforward container config.

As someone else mentioned it may be as simple as:

  devices:
      - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0

But you can just as easily use the /dev/serial tree to have stable names. Those names come out of the box with udev. You can always make your own too, I’ve done it, it’s not hard.

HA can be deployed as a container. Yes it uses containers.

I’m impressed with your knowledge of the Linux ecosystem. Regardless, passing usb devices to the containerised version is still more effort than it’s worth for the average user.

I'm doing USB passthrough for Z Wave right now and it's trivial. Just bind a volume to the device file.

Maybe Zigbee is different for some reason?

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