SelfHosted on Dev notes

Your own Home Assistant add-on

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 23:00:00 +0100

In the previous post in the series I described the process of externalizing you HA (Home Assistant) using my custom addon. Make sure to check that out if you haven’t already. This time I’ll share the details of the add-on development process.

First steps

When building the add-on my first steps obviously went towards the existing online resources. The first thing I’ve found was the extensive tutorial on https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/add-ons/tutorial, but there seems to be an easier hands-on approach. Instead of following the tutorial we’ll use the official template from https://github.com/home-assistant/addons-example.

Externalize Home Assistant

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 10:30:00 +0100

This is a third post in the Smart Home series. See the previous post if you haven’t already: https://blog.michal.pawlik.dev/posts/smarthome/zigbee-setup/. Last time I wrote about Zigbee and shown how to control smart home devices. In this post I want to show you one of many ways you can use to expose your HA (Home Assistant) instance to the internet.

Why expose?

All of the examples in previous posts were referring to local instance of Home Assistant. To work with it you had to be with the same network. While it’s not a problem when you are at home, there are cases when you want to access HA from the external network. Those cases include controlling the heat, accessing monitoring, switching light etc. when you are not home.

Story of a burned down server

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Do you know that feeling, waking up in the morning just to learn your website and self hosted services are down for unknown reason? That moment when you feel your VPS has literally moved to the cloud?

The fire

This is exactly what happened to me one day of March in 2021. I woke up in the morning, checked the news and learned that there’s an fire incident in SBG2 (sources: reference1 reference2). My first thought this is why we do backups, then I realized I’m really going to use them. My main VPS was there and it was not responding.

Personal blog: choosing a platform

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Say you want to start a blog, perhaps even join #100DaysToOffload. There are some questions you need to ask yourself. How do I start? Do I create an account somewhere? Should I build a website?

For the starters, you have two options. You can either go for using a platform or for self hosted.

Blogging platforms

Say you want someone to host the platform for you, then you have some better and worse choices. There is a plenty of platforms like medium.com, wordpress.com and alike. Some people try using platforms like instagram which I consider a terrible idea.

Using Caddy server as a reverse proxy

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I want to share a simple solution for the simple problem I wanted to solve some time ago. The problem definition is following:

I have a top level domain and a VPS operating on it. I also have a blog you are reading now hosted with Gitlab Pages. I want to host a website from my top level domain.

Hosting pages using Gitlab pages (similarly to Github Pages) is very convenient to set up, you just set up a pipeline and a subdomain configure the subdomain.