Install and run Monitor Docker plugin on Home-Assistant Supervised version the right way.

10 April 2021 - 3 mins read time
Tags: home-assistant HA Debian Supervised Monitor Docker Plugin HACS

Source: KRDesigns.com blogs, Home-Assistant, Monitor Docker, HACS, Portainer, Sami Jawhar project

SOFTWARE

Why this guide?

Monitor Docker is a very nice plugin if you would like to add plugins/sensor to monitor all your docker running on your network. So if you are running Docker Home-Assistant core you will be able to run it. However like my self and many other, we want to have more feature for our Home-Assistant which the team called it Supervised version. Supervised version run with strict rules which exclude Home-Assistant running with /var/run/docker.sock in which required by Monitor Docker to get the sensor information. So, up until last week I have not find a better way to install it without having to modified HA Docker volume detail everytime HA being updated to a new version.

How do I do it:

I fork Sami Jawhar project and build more container adn support more platform such as a Raspberry Pi 32bit and 64bit and have the container available on Docker Hub, this way I can help anyone from Home-Assistant community to enjoy Monitor Docker without any problem.

  1. You will need to install your HA Supervised version. If you need help on installing this version for Raspberry Pi 4, you can follow my guide here

  2. Install HACS and Monitor Docker

  3. For a better docker control I will also install Portainer on my server.

  4. create a local TLS certificate following the docker guide and make sure to copy the certificate into your server or better create one inside you machine.

  5. install ranrinc docker-socker-proxy by going to your HA server CLI and type docker run --name docker-socket-proxy --restart always -d -p 2376:2376 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /<YOUR-DOCKER>/docker/certs:/run/secrets ranrinc/docker-socket-proxy

  6. Make a new directory .certs inside your HA config directory and make sure HA able to read that directory. Copy 3 files into your .certs directory from your /<YOUR-DOCKER>/docker/certs The 3 files are ca.pem, cert.pem, and key.pem.

  7. Add Monitor Docker config with this setup 
    monitor_docker:
  - name: Docker
 url: tcp://<YOUR-IP>:2376
 certpath: '/config/.certs'
 # containers:
 rename:
   plex: Plex
 # monitored_conditions:

  8. Reboot your Home-Assistant and if everything working correctly you should be able to get individual sensor appearing on your Home-Assistant states.

  9. Thats its! Oh the best part for docker-socker-proxy it can run on a multiple Docker server, this way you could also monitor those containers too. For those machine you dont need to create a new certificate since you can used the same one that you just create for the first docker. IF you used the same one, you dont need a multiple certs directory for each server.

P.S I include Monitor Docker config for you to follow:

monitor_docker:
  - name: DockerOne
    url: tcp://<YOUR-1stIP>:2376
    certpath: '/config/.certs'
    # containers:
    rename:
      plex: Plex
    # monitored_conditions:
  - name: DockerTwo
    url: tcp://<YOUR-2ndIP>:2376
    certpath: '/config/.certs'
    # containers:
    rename:
      plex: Plex
    # monitored_conditions:

The complete Monitor Docker in actions

monitordocker

Closing

I hope this guide will help you install Monitor Docker into your Home-Assistant Supervised version and you will be always able to run it without having to modified HA Docker container setup manually.