Managing Home Assistant in Docker with Komodo

Should you run Home Assistant in Docker? Is it hard? Can you still get the add-on experience? In this video I show how I run Home Assistant and all of its companion services in Docker, manage the whole thing from a clean web UI with Komodo, get update notifications right inside Home Assistant, and ping a private Discord channel whenever something goes sideways.

What’s Covered

I moved from HAOS to a Docker setup over the winter, and Komodo — an open-source, Git-driven container management platform — is what made it painless. I walk through the full stack running on my Home Assistant box, how radio sticks and Matter/Thread discovery work in Docker, deploying stacks straight from a Git repo with webhooks, and the two things that make it feel just like HAOS: update entities surfaced right on the Home Assistant dashboard through the Komodo HACS integration, and Komodo’s built-in alerting piped to a private Discord channel.

If the only thing keeping you on HAOS is the one-click add-on experience, this setup gives you the same thing — with the entire Docker ecosystem available instead of a curated list, and your whole smart home version controlled in Git.

Stacks Running in This Setup

Home Assistant Core • Z-Wave JS • Mosquitto MQTT • OpenThread Border Router • Matter Server • ha-mcp server • Grafana • VictoriaMetrics • Music Assistant • Cloudflared • Backrest (restic) • Traefik

Links & Tools

• Komodo — Open-source container management platform (GitHub).
• Komodo Home Assistant integration — Surfaces stacks, containers, and update entities in Home Assistant (install via HACS).
• HACS — Home Assistant Community Store.
• Home Assistant — The brains of the whole thing.
• My full Docker homelab repo — Every compose file, env, network, and volume from this setup.

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