Before You Begin

Before you install and set up haaska, there are some things you should set up and have ready. Without these, Amazon's Alexa Voice service and haaska will not work.

Version

You must be running Home Assistant 0.78 or newer. Older versions are no longer compatible with this latest release.

Port Forwarding

You must have port forwarding set up for your Home Assistant install. While we can't provide instructions for every install, there are several guides available online. You can try WikiHow, or PortForward.com. You will typically be forwarding port 8123 or 443. This is based on what port you use to access Home Assistant, such as https://myhass:8123 or similar.

HTTPS/SSL, and Dynamic DNS

You must be using HTTPS/SSL. This is a requirement of Amazon, and cannot be skipped. There are several guides to do this with free services like Let's Encrypt. If your connection/Home Assistant install doesn't have a static IP to the internet (most installs won't), then you'll need to use a Dynamic DNS service.

There are several Dynamic DNS services out there, as well as different ways to add an SSL certificate to set up HTTPS.

To set up both, we recommend the Home Assistant Blog post: Effortless encryption with Let's Encrypt and DuckDNS.

Hass.io Note

The Wanderer also provides an install guide that mentions setting up DuckDNS and Let’s Encrypt for Hass.io. You can read about it here: Hass.io and Alexa. We'd recommend follwing steps 2.1 to 2.7. The rest of the steps are covered by our guides.

Self-Signed Certificates

These are not easily supported. If possible, please use Let's Encrypt. If you insist on a self-signed certificate, during setup, you will have to set SSL Verify to "false". There are ways to add your certificate, but this is not covered in this guide.

Amazon Developer and AWS Account

You will need to have a valid Amazon Developer, and AWS account. These are free to sign up for.

For Amazon Developer, go to their page (developer.amazon.com), and click "Sign In". From there, you can click "Create your Amazon Developer account".

For Amazon Web Services (AWS), go to their page (aws.amazon.com), and click "Sign Up". It will ask you for a credit card, but do not worry - AWS includes a "free tier". The service that haaska uses, AWS Lambda, will allow up to 1,000,000 requests, per month, free. You can read more here: AWS Lambda - Pricing.

For your own safety, you are encouraged to look at Billing, and set limits/budgets, just in case. If you use other AWS Services, they may be subject to a cost.

---

Next Step

Now let's go to Downloading and Preparing for haaska!