Control Proxmox VE from Home Assistant

Capable of controlling a myriad of smart devices and IoT gizmos, Home Assistant is one of the best services you can self-host

Home Assistant is one of the best services you can self-host on your workstation, capable of controlling a myriad of smart devices and IoT gizmos. If you’re as much of a fan of Proxmox as I am, you may already have configured a HASS virtual machine on top of your PVE host.

Typically, you’d use the Console tab on Proxmox’s UI to manage your Home Assistant server. But have you ever wanted to flip the (metaphorical) script by overseeing your Proxmox Virtual Environment’s operations from your HASS server? For tinkerers who find this wacky idea intriguing, here’s a detailed guide on how you can control your Proxmox workstation from your Home Assistant hub.

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What you’ll need for this project

From the title alone, you may have guessed that a Proxmox server and a Home Assistant instance are the centerpieces of the project, and you’re free to virtualize the latter inside your PVE war machine. Speaking of, there are a couple of ways to deploy HASS on Proxmox, but I suggest ditching the container route and going with a virtual machine for your Home Assistant hub. You could technically set up the necessary HACS add-on regardless of your virtual guest, but VMs make the installation process a lot simpler.

Configuring the HACS integration in Home Assistant

Once you’ve got a Proxmox server and an HASS instance up and running, it’s time to arm the latter with Home Assistant Community Store. To do so,

Setting up the Proxmox integration on Home Assistant

Now that you’ve installed HACS on your Home Assistant server, you can use it to configure the Proxmox VE integration.

Creating an access token in Proxmox

While the Home Assistant instance restarts, you'd want to create an API token for the Proxmox VE integration inside your PVE server.

Connecting the Proxmox server to Home Assistant

With both the Proxmox workstation and HASS instance configured, it’s time to pair them together.

Control your Proxmox server from Home Assistant

If you’ve followed all the steps correctly, Home Assistant will display the resource consumption, specs, virtual guests, and other details of your Proxmox system in the Overview section. For folks who want even more control over their Proxmox VMs and containers, you can select them inside the Devices section of the Devices & services tab and enable the Start, Stop, Restart, and other toggles inside the Services panel.

While it’s a fun project, I recommend creating the API token for a non-root user to increase the security of your Proxmox server. Likewise, you can further reduce the attack surface of your Home Assistant-Proxmox combo by isolating your insecure IoT paraphernalia inside a VLAN connection.

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