I would recommend Unraid. Not sure what people think of it round here as surprised no one has mentioned it. My homelab was a mix of machines for VMs, Docker and NAS, and I consolidated it last year with Unraid and couldn't be happier. I run Plex, Immich, Wordpress, Home Assistant and a load of other containers, alongside a Windows and Ubuntu VM on a cheap eBay HP Z workstation. If on a NUC with only a single drive, V7 of Unraid will now work without an array, so a single drive basically. It'll give you a GUI for Docker and everything.
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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What's the verdict on yunohost if we are talking easy? I think so the applications being mentioned has good support on yunohost?
I'd say go Debian and Docker, proxmox is nice if you're running a lot of VMs or want HA and clustering but otherwise you don't really need it.
If you want a GUI for docker containers there are several, Komodo or Portainer are good options.
I have a DS218Play and a Intel NUC 6th gen with Proxmox.
I use my NAS as file sharing, everything else is running in Proxmox: HomeAssistant, Plex, Immich, QBitorrent, AdGuard, Frigate, ARR suite...
How do you find frigate with the NUC? It works pretty well?
It works well, but I only have one camera and I've set a low resolution stream for frigate detection.
Check out Komodo for doing docker UI work. Pretty new, but already awesome and making lots of progress
This looks like an alternative to portainer or dockge. Am I correct?
Yeah, it's an alt to portainer
That's pretty cool
Proxmox definitely has a harder set-up i am currently doing it right now and I've found it a bit of a learning curve, but it is definitely the ultimately better and more fun option if you ask me ;)
Someone should correct me if I'm wrong but auto update should be as easy as scheduling the commands for apt or whatever package manager your using to update.
Since you have Proxmox why would you switch? If you don't like it, then by all means, there are lots of other options. However there is a good reason Proxmox comes up a lot. (I don't personally use Proxmox so I don't know those reasons, but the people who recommend it give every indication they are smart people who understand the problem and so I trust them enough to say it is a good option)
Best is a subjective question. There is no objective way to say what is best. We can argue about pros and cons. We can argue about what we prefer. However that is all subjective and there is no one best answer.
I basically run this setup, Synology nas for storage and a nuc12 for proxmox. Things like pihole I run on both for HA. You will also have a much better experience using Plex on an Intel NUC with quick assist.
As mentioned above the helper scripts will save you a ton of time. You should definitely check them out. Proxmox allows you to easily backup and restore. So its much easier to tinker and play around without taking down the whole network.
Is Proxmox the best system to use for these applications? Would it be easier to just install Debian and Docker and run everything through containers on one OS instead of splitting them all up into LXC or VMs?
Proxmox is (nearly) a class of it's own. Yes, you need it.
You are not limited to lxc. Just run one or more of these Debians in VM's inside, and they can docker then as needed.
Don't forget to use the templates in Proxmox.
I run everything in LXC containers because AFAIK using VMs mean you are limited on shared resources. If I want to use the iGPU for Plex and something else it would be locked to only work on the Plex VM. I mainly just have an unprivileged LXC and a second privileged LXC both running portainer that run most of my services.
Six one way half a dozen the other.
I personally would go down the proxmox lxc route using the Proxmox Helper Scrips the get the containers up and running.
Run K8S on a VM on Proxmox for this stuff
Kubernetes is hard and complex but if you want something flexible and scalable it is what you want.
Hey, it's nice to talk to you. I've seen you around this community and I like your comments.
I said K8S because I work with it, but if OP doesn't need HA I guess Podman is fine too. I don't like Docker anymore after what they pulled a year or so back
Docker compose is still a solid way to deploy software. Podman is cool but still fairly new.
Kubernetes is just a beast to work with. Unless you absolutely want I wouldn't bother. K3s isn't bad but it is painful to do anything.
It definitely takes more effort to get started
I use Proxmox because its handy to be able to use both LXC containers and full VMs. I installed it as an ISO so its built on top of Debian. There are helper scripts specific to installing Home Assistant on a VM (as well as a number of other things). And the proxmox UI comes in handy.
I have Home Assistant in a VM so I can run it on top of HAOS. Then the rest of the box is set up as an unprivileged LXC where I installed docker. I run all my *ARR apps straight on my Synology (via docker) so they have fast access to my Library volume, and everything else running on the setup I just described. Then I use Portainer to maintain my containers so I can manage both the syno and proxmox docker installs from one page.
It's really just personal preference, and either way is fine.
Home Assistant insists that it must run on bare metal hardware and will not work well. This is a purely artificial limitation that home assistant puts on you. You can work around it with a lot of effort, or the limitations might not matter to you, but it is a limit to be aware of. I personally went to OpenHAB instead, but YMMV.
I've been running Home Assistant (HAOS) on Proxmox for years with no issues. It doesn't need to be on bare metal. VMs work fine.
I never read such a thing. I never had that myself and run ha on proxmox since many years. on Debian OS on proxmox.
Uhhh, I have always used Docker for Home Assistant with no issues? That being said, I'm no HA power user at all - so maybe you could elaborate about the limits you've encountered?
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ Home assistant container - the version for docker - doesn't support add-ons. If you go through a lot of effort you can make it work, but you won't get help. (easiest is to install some linux in the docker and then home assistant supervised on top of that)
There is no reason HAOS couldn't run just fine in a container (qemu not docker), but they intentionally detect that and break it (I tried, I probably could make it work but I don't have that much time)
To be fair, Addons are just other containers. If you're using a Docker install for Home Assistant, I think the idea is you already have a handle on your docker host, and you're capable of adding whatever other containers you might need.
Maybe, but the documentation says it can't be done.
note too that I wasn't running docker but instead a vm.
I think this is just a terminology difference. The documentation says that "Add Ons" are not supported in Container and Core, but "Add Ons" means the easy button you press to install those services. All of those Add On services are just containers that HAOS manages for you. Every single one of them can be set up as a container manually and function the same as the official "Add Ons."
I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the reason for this is that it's not technically possible for a container to manage other external containers. Does anybody know about this?
You can run docker in docker. I do that all the time (but via scripts so I know it does docker in docker, but I don't know how they do that).
But again, I wasn't even trying to run HA in docker, I was running in a VM container and still the above is refused by default.
Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks!
Not true at all. If you want to run Home Assistant on top of Home Assistant OS then it needs to be on bare metal or a full VM because its an OS. Running on HAOS is easy mode, but not required.