I own a couple TP-Link Tapo Wi-fi light bulbs. Currently, each family member installs an app on the phone to control the light bulbs. I wonder if there’s a way to do the same but in a browser (via docker app on my NAS). And because we may use smart devices of other brands in the future, it seems too much trouble to install yet another app on each phone.
If you (and the people who want to use these things) are on iOS, you could consider Homebridge
It is easier than a full home assistant install, and may be sufficient for what you want to do.
Home assistant might be overkill for your application (but it can do a lot more stuff)
I started on home assistant with just a couple Smart bulbs and oh boy has it gotten out of hand since then lol. Home bridge sounds good if that’s all that’s needed though.
Home Assistant hates it if you install anything else on your server besides Home Assistant. Don’t even think about running other docker containers besides HA or you’ll get persistent nags and it’ll prevent you from updating without doing workarounds
I use Home Assistant for controlling my smart lights. They do support Docker, but I installed it as a VM with KVM. You get more features with it, such as add-ons. But you should definitely look into your options. They have a diagram on this page.
To be fair, the add-ons are just containers installed and managed by HA. In most cases, you can install all of them as separate containers via something like Docker, but configuration takes more steps (though you also get more control).
Example: I have HA, Eclipse mosquitto, zigbee2mqtt, zwave-js-ui, node-red, Grafana, and influxdb all running as docker containers on two different devices (my main HA host wasn’t ideal for Zigbee and zwave USB dongles, so those are on a Pi 4). The other containers are accessible separately or from within HA as iFrame panels.
HomeAssistant and PiHole are the gateway drugs to selfhosting.
Home Assistant!
