Installing Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi

About this video

Home Assistant is the best smart home platform available — but getting it running for the first time can feel like a wall of choices. This video demystifies that. I walk through every installation method in order of difficulty: Home Assistant Green (plug-and-play, no setup), Raspberry Pi with the full Home Assistant OS (my recommendation for most people), Home Assistant Yellow, and virtualisation options for those with existing hardware. Then I do a full installation on a Raspberry Pi 5, walk through first-time setup, and get you to the welcome screen with a working instance.

Key takeaways

• Home Assistant Green is the easiest way to get started — plug in and go, no imaging or assembly. Right call if you just want to get running quickly.
• For anyone wanting room to expand, a Raspberry Pi 5 running full Home Assistant OS is the best starting point.
• Use an A2-rated SD card at minimum — standard SD cards aren't designed for Home Assistant's constant logging and will fail prematurely.
• For a permanent installation, switch from SD card to SSD as soon as practical. SD cards will eventually fail under the write load.
• The initial setup takes about 20 minutes. The real time investment comes when you start adding integrations and automations — and that's where the fun starts.

Video walkthrough

1. Choose your installation method — Home Assistant Green is the easiest: plug in, connect to the network, done. Raspberry Pi gives you more flexibility and room to grow. Home Assistant Yellow adds a Zigbee radio and M.2 slot. VMs and containers work if you have specific hardware requirements but come with add-on limitations.
2. Pick the right Raspberry Pi hardware — Pi 5 with 8 GB RAM is plenty. Use an A2-rated micro SD card (minimum 32 GB) to handle the frequent read/write cycles Home Assistant performs. For a permanent install, an SSD is more reliable long-term.
3. Flash the SD card — Download Raspberry Pi Imager, select your Pi model, navigate to Other Specific Purpose OS → Home Assistants and Home Automation → Home Assistant OS, select your SD card, and flash it. That's the whole operating system.
4. Assemble and boot — Install the heat sink and cooling fan, insert the flashed SD card, connect Ethernet and power. The Pi boots and runs first-run updates automatically — give it a few minutes. No keyboard or monitor needed.
5. First-time setup in the browser — Navigate to homeassistant.local:8123 from any device on the network. Create your user account — store that password somewhere safe, there's no recovery. Set your location (creates your Home Zone for location-based automations) and configure your time zone.
6. Troubleshoot if needed — Use Fing or a similar network scanner to find the Pi's IP address if the hostname doesn't resolve. If it still won't load, the SD card flash may need to be redone.