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Home Assistant OS
The dedicated, appliance-style operating system for Home Assistant -- a free, open-source home automation hub -- flashed straight to an SD card, USB drive, or run as a VM.
Target: Raspberry Pi (SD card), dedicated hardware (USB), or VMHome AutomationIoTOfficial homepage ↗Official docs ↗
This guide is synthesized from Home Assistant OS's own official documentation, linked above — always cross-check exact package/version names there before running these commands on a production server, since distro and project versions move over time.
1Install the Home Assistant OS installer app
The official installer handles downloading the right image and flashing it -- available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
2Flash the image to your target drive
Insert the SD card or USB drive, pick your device model (Raspberry Pi, Generic x86-64, ...) in the installer, and let it write the image.
This erases the target drive completely.
3Boot the device and wait for first-run setup
First boot takes several minutes while it expands the filesystem and downloads updates -- the device is reachable once the onboarding page loads.
http://homeassistant.local:8123