Installing Home Assistant in Supervised Mode

The main advantage of Supervised Mode is the ability to install add-ons. This makes it easy to integrate tools like Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Grafana, and many other useful add-ons without having to configure each one manually. Essentially, these add-ons are Docker containers with specifications that define access permissions, configuration parameters, and other necessary settings.

A detailed installation guide can be found here. Unfortunately, one of the requirements is Debian 12, as other operating systems are not officially supported.

If you attempt to install it on Ubuntu, you’ll encounter an incompatibility error:

[error] Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS is not supported!
dpkg: error processing archive homeassistant-supervised.deb (--install):
 new homeassistant-supervised package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1

After considerable research through forums and source code, I discovered an environment variable that bypasses this restriction, allowing installation on an unsupported OS:

sudo BYPASS_OS_CHECK=true dpkg -i homeassistant-supervised.deb

And voilà, Supervised Home Assistant is installed! In this mode, it may take some time to start up (around 5–10 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 4), but in return, you get a convenient way to manage add-ons.