How to set up Home Assistant

Smart home automation hub. This guide covers how to access it, log in for the first time, configure the basics, and where its data lives so you can back it up.

1. What is Home Assistant?

Open-source home automation hub. Control smart devices, create automations, and integrate with 3000+ services — all running locally on your own hardware.

2. Before you start

Home Assistant works best with network_mode: host for auto-discovery of Zeroconf/mDNS devices (Chromecast, HomeKit, etc). SparkBox runs HA in bridge mode to keep port isolation — for full auto-discovery, see the HA docs to switch to host networking.

3. How to access it

Once it's enabled, Home Assistant runs on your SparkBox at:

http://<your-NAS-IP>:8123

Auto-discovery works best with network_mode: host — see docs for that setup

4. First login

Home Assistant runs a multi-step onboarding wizard on first launch. Create your user account in the first step.

If it instead asks for a password you didn't set, check Settings → Passwords in your SparkBox dashboard — every auto-generated credential is listed there.

5. Where your data lives

Home Assistant's config and persistent data are stored on the SparkBox host under:

/opt/sparkbox/modules/homeassistant/config/

Backups via the SparkBox dashboard's Backup tile include this directory by default, so a single restore brings Home Assistant back to its current state on a fresh install.

Next steps