Installation

The first step to getting started with Home Assistant is to install it on a device. There are many ways to run it for all kinds of scenarios and all kinds of skill levels.

Easiest

Plug and play with Home Assistant Green

The affordable Home Assistant Green is the easiest way to start using Home Assistant. It's plug-and-play and comes withHome Assistant Operating System already installed.

Home Assistant Green

The easiest way to get started with Home Assistant

SKILLS REQUIRED

Interest in setting up a smart home

TOOLS REQUIRED

Ethernet connection

Get Home Assistant Green View tutorial

Easy

DIY with Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi, a mini low-cost computer, is one of the most popular platforms for running Home Assistant. If you want to learn how to DIY, this is a good way to start and gain experience.

Install Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi

A low-cost DIY solution to get started with Home Assistant

SKILLS REQUIRED

Assembling a Raspberry Pi setup
Flashing a Raspberry Pi

TOOLS REQUIRED

Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with power supply (minimum 2 GB RAM)
MicroSD card
Ethernet connection

Get Raspberry Pi

View tutorial

About installation types

Home Assistant offers two different installation types. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation type.

Home Assistant Operating System: An embedded, minimalistic operating system designed to run the Home Assistant ecosystem on single board computers (like the Home Assistant Green or a Raspberry Pi) or Virtual Machines. It is the most convenient option in terms of installation and maintenance and it supportsappsApps are additional standalone third-party software packages that can be installed on Home Assistant OS. [Learn more]. Home Assistant Operating System is the recommended installation type for most users.
Home Assistant Container: Container-based installation of Home Assistant. You need to bring your own system (such as Linux) with container orchestration (like Docker), and manually handle updates. Home Assistant Container installations don’t have access toappsApps are additional standalone third-party software packages that can be installed on Home Assistant OS. [Learn more].
- Note: Some integrations, such asThread andZ-Wave, are controlled byappsApps are additional standalone third-party software packages that can be installed on Home Assistant OS. [Learn more]. There is no out-of-the-box support for these on Container installations.

	HA OS¹	Container¹
Automations
Dashboards
Integrations
Apps
Blueprints
One-click updates
Backups

_{1: Names are abbreviated. The full names of the installation types are:Home Assistant Operating System
Home Assistant Container}

Intermediate

Extend with Home Assistant Yellow

The extensible Home Assistant Yellow comes with all the ingredients you need to help you build a robust smart home. All you need to do is to bring your own Raspberry Pi Compute Module.

Home Assistant Yellow

The powerful way to run Home Assistant

SKILLS REQUIRED

You're comfortable following instructions on:
Installing a compute module and a heat sink
Flashing a Raspberry Pi

TOOLS REQUIRED

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
Ethernet connection
USB storage drive
Screwdriver

Get Home Assistant Yellow View tutorial

Hard

Install on other hardware

Home Assistant can be repurposed and installed on various hardware, such as an Odroid or a generic x86-64 machine. The Home Assistant Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices even if you have little to no Linux experience.