Home Automation Stack

Stack for a Raspberry Pi home server running:

• UniFi Network Application — network controller for Ubiquiti devices
• MongoDB — database backend for UniFi (Raspberry Pi-compatible build)
• Home Assistant — home automation platform
• Mosquitto — MQTT broker
• Pi-hole — DNS-level ad blocking and local DNS/DHCP

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 4 (aarch64)
• Docker Compose or Podman with Quadlet support (Podman 4.4+)

Setup

1. Clone the repo onto the Pi:

   git clone <repo-url>
   cd autonomous

2. Create a .env file (not committed):

   MONGO_PASS=<strong-password>
   WEBPASSWORD=<pihole-admin-password>

3. Start all services using either Docker Compose or Podman Quadlet:

Docker Compose

docker compose up -d

Podman Quadlet

Copy (or symlink) the unit files to the systemd directory and start the services:

sudo cp quadlet/* /etc/containers/systemd/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start unifi-db.service unifi.service mosquitto.service homeassistant.service pihole.service

The unit files use absolute paths hardcoded to /home/forain/Projects/autonomous. If the repo is cloned elsewhere, update WorkingDirectory and all Volume= and EnvironmentFile= paths in each .container file accordingly.

On first start, init-mongo.sh runs automatically inside the unifi-db container to create the UniFi database user. This only happens when ./unifi-db is empty.

Services

Service	Access
UniFi Network Application	https://<pi-ip>:8443
Home Assistant	http://<pi-ip>:8123
Pi-hole	http://<pi-ip>/admin

Mosquitto listens on the host network (port 1883).

Resetting MongoDB

If the UniFi database needs to be recreated from scratch:

# Docker Compose
docker compose down
sudo rm -rf ./unifi-db
docker compose up -d

# Podman Quadlet
sudo systemctl stop unifi.service unifi-db.service
sudo rm -rf ./unifi-db
sudo systemctl start unifi-db.service unifi.service