ESPHome stable/beta/dev choice

[nagyrobi]

ESPHome has 3 flavours (also available as 3 different Home Assistant add-ons):

• stable
• beta
• dev

Would be nice to have a choice in the installer script to select which flavour to install. Not in the advanced settings, just at the beginning. The use case is to have the possibility to have the 3 different flavours installed as separate LXCs.

Not sure if the script also performs an update, however the dev flavour has daily updates (or more often when the leader developer performs an immediate build) so it would be very handy to be able to do the update through the script, at the flavour chosen during the installation.

The only question that remains to be thought about is how to mount a shared storage between them (in a Proxmox cluster environment), in order for all 3 LXCs to use the same ESPHome yaml configuration directory (just like they do as HA add-ons).

[tteck]

https://esphome.io/guides/faq.html#how-do-i-update-to-the-latest-version

After creation, pick your flavor and run in the LXC console

• pip3 install -U esphome for stable
• pip3 install --pre -U esphome for beta
• pip3 install https://github.com/esphome/esphome/archive/dev.zip for dev

Then a systemctl restart esphomeDashboard

[tteck]

You can update each using the same command.

[nagyrobi]

Wouldn't it be nice for the LXC script to prompt for a choice when first run?

[tteck]

With the ease of changing branches now, not worth the extra coding IMO
Most should stay on the stable branch (no confusing with options)

[nagyrobi]

Can you give me a hint on how to make a common shared directory between multiple LXC containers? Would be important to run in cluster environment, and be able to migrate.

For example, I'd host the files on the LXC running thestable flavour, and share it out as a network share to the other two. Any recommendation? Like NFS server on the first LXC and NFS client mounts on the other two?

[nagyrobi]

OK solved this myself. Posting here as others may also need this.
Install ESPHome LXC as privileged containers (unprivileged = no).

First install the container for the stable flavour.

1. set a static IP address for it in your network (say, 192.168.1.10)
2. Power it off, and add to the config file manually the entry lxc.apparmor.profile: unconfined
   (edit the config on the host with nano /etc/pve/lxc/<CTID>.conf)
3. start it, then then apt install nfs-kernel-server -y
4. edit the share to point to the esphome yaml config dir: nano /etc/exports
   and add /root/config/ 192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
5. run exportfs -ar
6. service nfs-server restart should not complain
7. put some dummy testfile in /root/config/ just to be able to check from the other machine

Install a new container for the beta flavour (see above post to change stable to beta)

1. in container options enable Feature NFS and reboot.
2. then apt install nfs-common
3. try to mount the share from command line
   mount -t nfs -o vers=3 192.168.1.10:/root/config/ /root/config/
4. check in /root/config do you see the dummy file from the other LXC?
5. if yes, you can add to /etc/fstab the entry to mount at boot:
   192.168.1.10:/root/config /root/config nfs vers=3 0 0

You can repeat the last section for the dev flavour.

Credits to here and here.

To install a smb share in order to access the yaml files like the addon used to share them, follow steps from here on the stable container.