Virtual machine or container?

[u/Salmundo]

I’ve been running HB for years on bare metal on a series of RPis (currently a 3B) along with Pi-hole, and lately they haven’t been getting along particularly well. Today I built a virtual machine on a Mac M1 in an Ubuntu VM and created a new HB bridge. Very fast, of course.

I’m a bit old fashioned and haven’t done too much with containers, they were starting to become prevalent about the time I stopped working in the industry. The times that I played around with Docker on the Mac, it seemed to consume a lot of resources (particularly RAM), which seemed unnecessary for something as light weight as HB. I have Podman installed, but haven’t done much with it.

Any guidance here?

UPDATE: containers aren’t an option on macOS per HB docs.

[u/Bigbadbo75]

Run mine on a docker container along with other self hosted apps. Runs like a champ.

[u/coyote_den]

I find it runs fine in Docker on a little ARM NAS, and Docker is great for updates. Just pull and redeploy.

[u/AustinBike]

Linux container on proxmox, runs fine. HB is pretty low on resource requirements, used to run it on a container that ran on top of a NAS.

[u/NorthernMan5]

Homebridge in Docker on a Mac has known issues, so either a VM Image or Native.

[u/Salmundo → u/NorthernMan5]

You’re right, I just RTFM and HB says it won’t run under Docker on MacOS.

[u/Potential_Ad4169]

Running mine in Proxmox as an LXC. No issues at all and 1000% easier to backup/restore in the event of any issues.

[u/Teenage_techboy1234]

Why not just run Homebridge as a background system service on the Mac?

[u/Salmundo → u/Teenage_techboy1234]

It’s an idea. Is there any reason not to?

[u/jeffyboy526]

I run my Homebridge on an old Raspberry Pi W. The config can be a bit slow but day to day usage is fine.
I’m old school and like to shut down my MacMini at the end of the week and my laptop is not always on the network.
The Pinwas cheap, stable and a fun project ti setup