The Missing Quickstart Guide to the Home Assistant “Advanced SSH & Web Terminal” community add-on

The “Advanced SSH & Web Terminal” community add-on for the Home Assistant home automation package is a really awesome utility written by a guy who seems to have a bit of a surly attitude towards his users. (Hard as it is to imagine a developer with a surly attitude.) Following lots of questions about his poor documentation and comments from him resisting being in any way helpful, I put together this quickstart guide for those hapless folks who like myself who were initially trapped by 502 errors (see bad gateway 502, issue #684 in the Github repo) in using this add-on due to the very unclear documentation.

For those here with this problem, here is the “quickstart” documentation the Home Assistant “Advanced SSH & Web Terminal” community add-on package is missing:

1.) After install, the tabs for the documentation, configuration, and logs are at the top of the page:

2.) fill in a username and password in the Configuration tab.

Note: The Documentation tab (also available in this repo at https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-ssh/blob/main/ssh/DOCS.md) gives more info about options you can use here. To be extra-secure you really should set up keys, which you can find info about in the Documentation, but this is a quickstart, so to get this mother love bone rolling we’ll just pick a username and password.

3.) After entering a username and password, be sure to scroll to the bottom of that Options block and click ‘save’.

Note: Be careful! There are several “save” buttons on that tab, one for each block. If you click the wrong ‘save’ button, it won’t tell you there’s a problem, but it won’t save your chosen username & password! If you have problems later in this process, come back to this step and make sure you saved your username and password correctly.

4.) Go back to the Info tab, then click ‘Start’.

5.) Some CPU & RAM meters and a link for “Open Web UI” will appear. Click “Open Web UI”.

6.) Ta-daa! You’re in. Or, at least, I was, by following those steps. YMMV.

You can now SSH in from a normal SSH client, using the name and password you set up in step 2.


Related articles

  • Michael Kupietz
  • FileMaker Consultant
  • Serving clients locally and remotely, in California's San Francisco Bay Area and nationwide
  • Phone: (415) 545-8743
  • Download vCard