helm-charts/homeassistant/templates/NOTES.txt

{{- $replicas := include "homeassistant.replicas" (dict "scaleDown" .Values.scaleDown "replicas" .Values.replicas) -}}
{{- $res := fromYaml (include "homeassistant.effectiveResources" .Values.resources) -}}
{{/*
The ephemeral-storage limit goes through formatNumber for the reason issue #157
documents: it comes back from fromYaml as float64, and a bare byte count would
print as "1e+06" here just as it did in the rendered manifest.
*/}}
{{- $ephRaw := index ($res.limits | default dict) "ephemeral-storage" -}}
{{- $eph := "the computed ephemeral-storage limit" -}}
{{- if not (kindIs "invalid" $ephRaw) -}}
{{- $eph = include "homeassistant.formatNumber" $ephRaw -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- $startup := fromYaml (include "homeassistant.startupProbe" .Values.startupProbe) -}}
{{- $budget := "" -}}
{{- if and (kindIs "float64" $startup.periodSeconds) (kindIs "float64" $startup.failureThreshold) -}}
{{- $budget = printf "%.0f seconds" (mulf $startup.periodSeconds $startup.failureThreshold) -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- $ctr := fromYaml (include "homeassistant.containerSecurityContext" .Values.securityContext) -}}
{{- $caps := (index $ctr "capabilities") | default dict -}}
{{- $netRaw := has "NET_RAW" ((index $caps "add") | default list) -}}
{{- $ing := .Values.ingress -}}
{{- $hosts := $ing.hosts | default list -}}
{{- $tls := $ing.tls | default list -}}
{{- $ann := $ing.annotations | default dict -}}
{{- $issuer := or (hasKey $ann "cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer") (hasKey $ann "cert-manager.io/issuer") -}}
{{- $certName := "" -}}
{{- range $t := $tls }}{{ if not $certName }}{{ $certName = ($t.secretName | default "") }}{{ end }}{{ end }}
{{- $placeholder := false -}}
{{- range $h := $hosts }}{{ if eq ($h.host | default "") "chart-example.local" }}{{ $placeholder = true }}{{ end }}{{ end }}
{{- $pod := printf "%s-%s-sfs-0" .Release.Name .Chart.Name -}}
{{- $sfs := printf "%s-%s-sfs" .Release.Name .Chart.Name -}}
Home Assistant {{ .Chart.AppVersion }} — release {{ .Release.Name }} in namespace {{ .Release.Namespace }}.

{{- if $ing.enabled }}

ACCESS
{{- range $h := $hosts }}
{{- $scheme := "http" }}
{{- range $t := $tls }}
{{- if has ($h.host | default "") ($t.hosts | default list) }}{{ $scheme = "https" }}{{ end }}
{{- end }}
{{- range $p := ($h.paths | default list) }}
  {{ $scheme }}://{{ $h.host }}{{ $p.path }}
{{- end }}
{{- end }}

  This chart keeps the upstream-style ingress block — hosts and tls lists
  instead of the domain/clusterIssuer pair the other charts in this repo use.
  That is a documented exception, and it has one consequence worth knowing
  before you go looking for a certificate:
{{- if not $tls }}

  ingress.tls is empty, so the Ingress carries no TLS section at all and the
  URLs above are plain http. Nothing here requests a certificate.
{{- else if not $issuer }}

  ingress.tls names a secretName, but NOTHING IN THIS RELEASE CREATES THAT
  SECRET. The chart adds no cert-manager annotation of its own — unlike the
  other charts here, which build one from ingress.clusterIssuer — and
  ingress.annotations carries neither cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer nor
  cert-manager.io/issuer. Until that Secret exists by some other means,
  ingress-nginx answers with its own default certificate and every browser
  shows a name mismatch. Add the annotation under ingress.annotations:

    ingress:
      annotations:
        cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt
{{- else }}

  The certificate is requested by cert-manager through the annotation you set
  under ingress.annotations; the chart adds none by itself, and it does not
  name the TLS Secret either — you did, in ingress.tls. cert-manager's
  ingress-shim names the Certificate after that Secret, so this is the object
  to watch while the browser still shows a warning:

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} get certificate {{ $certName | default "<your ingress.tls secretName>" }}
{{- end }}
{{- else }}

ACCESS — NO INGRESS
  ingress.enabled is false, so this release has no Ingress. Nothing else in
  this chart reads ingress.hosts, so no other setting silently depends on it.
  Reach the instance inside the cluster with

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} port-forward svc/{{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-service 8123:{{ .Values.service.port }}

  and open http://localhost:8123. The Service listens on port {{ .Values.service.port }} and
  forwards to the container's 8123; keeping 8123 as the LOCAL port matters,
  because a browser that has already talked to another Home Assistant on
  localhost:8123 will otherwise mix up the stored tokens.
{{- end }}
{{- if and $ing.enabled $placeholder }}

THE INGRESS IS PUBLISHED UNDER THE CHART'S PLACEHOLDER HOST
  ingress.enabled is true while ingress.hosts still contains the default entry
  "chart-example.local". That name resolves nowhere, so the Ingress exists,
  ingress-nginx accepts it, and no request ever arrives. Set ingress.hosts to
  the name you actually serve — for example example.com — before assuming the
  release is unreachable for some deeper reason.
{{- end }}
{{ if eq $replicas "0" }}
SCALED TO ZERO
  {{ if .Values.scaleDown }}scaleDown: true{{ else }}replicas: 0{{ end }} — the StatefulSet runs with replicas: 0, so nothing answers
  until you set it back and upgrade again. The PVC, the OnePasswordItem and
  the Service{{ if $ing.enabled }} and Ingress stay in place, so no state is lost and no
  certificate is re-issued.{{ else }} stay in place, so no state is lost.{{ end }}

  Bringing this release back up is not a no-op: the pod re-reads the config
  item from the vault as it starts, and it starts on whatever app version the
  chart carries now. A release parked at zero for a long time therefore comes
  back changed in two ways at once.
{{ end }}
THE CONFIGURATION IS A 1PASSWORD ITEM, AND IT IS READ-ONLY IN THE CONTAINER
  Home Assistant is configured from files, not from the environment, and this
  chart delivers those files out of a single 1Password item. The operator
  copies the item's FIELDS into the Kubernetes Secret, one key per field name,
  and this chart mounts exactly three of them. The field names are decided
  here and appear nowhere in 1Password, so they have to match to the letter:

    secrets.configSecretRef → {{ .Values.secrets.configSecretRef | default "(not set — the render fails without it)" }}
      → Secret {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-config-secret

        config           → /config/configuration.yaml
        http-config      → /config/http-config.yaml
        recorder-config  → /config/recorder-config.yaml

  The three are separate files on purpose, and configuration.yaml has to pull
  the other two in itself — the chart only mounts them, it does not wire them
  together. A working minimum for the "config" field is

    default_config:
    http: !include http-config.yaml
    recorder: !include recorder-config.yaml

  A field spelled differently yields a Secret without that key. The pod then
  hangs in CreateContainerConfigError while the Secret itself exists, so it
  looks as if the operator had done its job. What it actually delivered:

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} get secret {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-config-secret -o jsonpath='{.data}'

  All three are mounted with subPath from a Secret volume, which makes them
  READ-ONLY inside the container. Home Assistant's own file editor and every
  UI page that offers to write configuration.yaml will fail on these three
  paths — and only on these three. Everything else under /config is on the
  PVC and writable as usual.

  Pointing secrets.configSecretRef at a DIFFERENT item rolls the pod: the
  StatefulSet carries a checksum over the rendered OnePasswordItem, so the
  item path is part of the pod spec. Changing the CONTENT of the same item
  does not, and this is the sharp edge — Helm never sees that content, and a
  subPath mount is never refreshed by the kubelet even after the operator has
  updated the Secret. The running pod keeps the old files until something
  else restarts it, which may be months later, so a broken value surfaces far
  away from the edit that caused it. After every content change:

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} rollout restart statefulset/{{ $sfs }}

BEHIND AN INGRESS, THE http BLOCK DECIDES BETWEEN 400 AND WRONG CLIENT IPs
  Every request reaching Home Assistant through ingress-nginx arrives from the
  controller's pod IP, not from the browser. The http-config field is where
  that is dealt with, and both ways of getting it wrong are quiet in their own
  way:

    use_x_forwarded_for: true without the proxy's address in trusted_proxies
    makes Home Assistant reject the request outright — the browser gets
    400 Bad Request and the log names the untrusted address it saw.

    Neither setting at all means every client looks like the ingress
    controller. Nothing fails; you simply get one address in the logbook for
    everyone, and Home Assistant's login-attempt ban then locks out all users
    at once because they share that address.

  The value belongs to the ingress controller's POD network, not to the nodes
  and not to the clients:

    use_x_forwarded_for: true
    trusted_proxies:
      - 10.42.0.0/16      # the cluster's pod CIDR — check yours

  Read the address Home Assistant actually sees straight out of the log
  rather than guessing at the CIDR:

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} logs {{ $pod }} | grep -i forwarded

THE FIRST VISITOR BECOMES THE OWNER
  Against an empty /config Home Assistant has no users and sends every visitor
  into onboarding, where the first account created is the owner. There is no
  password to look up anywhere and no Secret holding one — whoever reaches the
  URL first owns this instance. Do the onboarding right after the first
  rollout, not the next morning.

  Onboarding also decides the instance's location, unit system and time zone
  and stores them under /config/.storage. That is state on the PVC, not
  configuration in the 1Password item: it survives a pod restart, and it is
  gone with the volume.

TZ AND HOME ASSISTANT'S OWN TIME ZONE ARE TWO SETTINGS, NOT ONE
  core.timezone ({{ .Values.core.timezone | default "unset" }}) is passed to the container as TZ and is the only
  environment variable this chart sets by itself. Home Assistant's own time
  zone is the one from onboarding or from configuration.yaml, and it is NOT
  derived from this value. When the two disagree, log timestamps and
  time-based automations disagree with them, and nothing reports a problem.

WHAT A READY POD PROVES — AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
  All three probes fetch "/" on the container port. That path is served by the
  HTTP integration as soon as it has come up, which happens early in the
  bootstrap and says nothing about the rest:

    A configuration.yaml that cannot be loaded does not necessarily keep the
    pod from becoming Ready. Home Assistant falls back to safe mode, serves
    the frontend with none of your configuration in effect, and the rollout
    goes green. An instance that comes back "empty" after a config change is
    this, and the reason is only in the log.

    An integration that fails to set up, a recorder that cannot reach its
    database, a full volume — none of them are in the probe's answer.

  So check the log after every config change, not the rollout status:

    kubectl -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} logs {{ $pod }}

  The startup probe gates liveness and readiness and gives the first boot
  {{ if $budget }}{{ $budget }}{{ else }}its configured budget{{ end }}, which is deliberately generous: a cold start
  installs and initializes integrations. If a start outruns that budget the
  kubelet kills the container mid-setup and the next attempt begins again,
  which looks like CrashLoopBackOff with no error in the log at all.

/config IS THE WHOLE OF THE STATE, AND helm uninstall DELETES IT
  The owner account, every long-lived token, all UI-created automations and
  dashboards, every integration's stored credentials and the recorder
  database live under /config — on {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-pvc ({{ .Values.core.storage.size }}
  from storage class {{ .Values.core.storage.storageClass | default "the cluster default" }}), inside its subPath "hass-config".
  Only the three files above come from the vault; nothing else here is
  reproducible from the chart's values.

  That PVC is an ordinary claim in this release, not a StatefulSet
  volumeClaimTemplate: "helm uninstall {{ .Release.Name }}" deletes it, and with a Delete
  reclaim policy the instance is then gone for good. Back it up before
  uninstalling — a resource-policy annotation added to the live PVC afterwards
  does not help, because Helm reads that annotation from the release manifest.

  The recorder is what makes the volume grow, and its retention is a field of
  the 1Password item (purge_keep_days in recorder-config), not a chart value.
  Growing core.storage.size only takes effect if the storage class allows
  volume expansion; shrinking it is refused by Kubernetes and makes the next
  helm upgrade fail on the PVC instead of touching the data.

/tmp AND /run ARE emptyDirs AND COUNT AGAINST ephemeral-storage
  The root filesystem is read-only, so the two paths the image must write to —
  /run for s6-overlay's state and /tmp for Home Assistant's scratch files —
  are emptyDirs. An emptyDir counts against the container's ephemeral-storage
  limit ({{ $eph }}). Going over it does not fail a request: the kubelet evicts the
  whole pod, and the reason is on the pod, not in Home Assistant's log. Where
  integrations pull large downloads through /tmp, raise
  resources.requests.ephemeralStorage — the limit follows it through
  resources.limitFactor.
{{- if gt (atoi $replicas) 1 }}

MORE THAN ONE REPLICA WILL NOT WORK HERE
  replicas is {{ $replicas }}, but every pod of this StatefulSet mounts the SAME
  ReadWriteOnce claim {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-pvc at /config — there is no
  volumeClaimTemplate and no per-pod volume. Unless the storage class hands
  that claim to several nodes, the additional pods stay stuck before start;
  where they do start, two Home Assistant processes write the same state
  directory and the same recorder database at once. This chart is built for
  one replica, and Home Assistant does not run active-active.
{{- end }}
{{- if not $netRaw }}

NET_RAW HAS BEEN DROPPED FROM THE CONTAINER
  The chart's default adds NET_RAW back after dropping ALL, and the effective
  securityContext.container for this release no longer has it. That is a
  values override, not a chart default. Home Assistant's device discovery —
  the DHCP watcher, the ping and arp integrations — opens raw sockets, and
  without the capability it does not fail loudly: those integrations log
  "Operation not permitted" and simply find nothing. Devices that used to
  appear on their own will stop appearing.
{{- end }}
{{- if .Values.env }}

env IS APPENDED, AND HOME ASSISTANT WILL NOT READ IT ON ITS OWN
  The {{ len .Values.env }} entries land after TZ and are rendered through tpl, so a value may
  contain template expressions. Note what they do NOT do: apart from TZ, Home
  Assistant takes no configuration from the environment. An entry here reaches
  the application only if the YAML in the 1Password item picks it up with the
  !env_var tag — otherwise it sits in the pod spec unused.

  Anything sensitive belongs in valueFrom.secretKeyRef rather than a plain
  value: a value is stored in the pod spec and readable by anyone who can read
  pods in {{ .Release.Namespace }}.
{{- end }}