Home Assistant Community Apps: the addon catalogue you get by default

A repository you usually do not have to add

Home Assistant Community Apps is an app repository for Home Assistant, and the first thing the README says about installation is that in general there is no need to install it on your instance, because it is activated and added by Home Assistant by default. That is the single most important operational fact here, because it means most people encounter this repository without choosing it. The project exists because Home Assistant allows anyone to create app repositories to share their apps for Home Assistant easily, and this is one of those repositories, providing extra apps for an installation. The stated primary goal is to provide additional, high quality apps that allow you to take your automated home to the next level, and the project carries a project stage badge and a maintenance badge in its header, which is how the community signals the state of the collection as a whole. If the repository is missing on your setup, the README says adding it is easy through the app store, using the URL of this GitHub repository. So the choice a user makes is not whether to add the repository but which of its addons to install from it.

An addon is a directory of configuration and documentation

The tree explains the packaging model, because every addon is a directory at the root with a consistent set of files. The example/ directory is the template to copy, and it contains CHANGELOG.md, DOCS.md, README.md, config.yaml, icon.png, logo.png and a translations/ directory. The example addon is itself published in the catalogue, listed as the Example app by Home Assistant Community Apps, which is a nice touch since it means the template is a working addon rather than a sketch. The structure tells you what a Home Assistant addon is. config.yaml is the addon manifest, where the image, the ports, the environment and the configuration options are declared. DOCS.md is the user documentation, and the README links to it from the catalogue listing. icon.png and logo.png are the assets the app store shows. translations/ holds the localised strings. CHANGELOG.md is the per-addon version history. The top level also has .apps.yml, which is the catalogue index, and repository.json, which is the metadata Home Assistant reads when it fetches the list of addons to show in the store.

Fifty apps, and the shape of the catalogue

The catalogue is broad, and the mix tells you what a Home Assistant user actually wants to run beside the automation engine. Networking and infrastructure come first, with AdGuard Home as a network-wide ads and trackers blocking DNS server, EMQX described as the most scalable MQTT broker for IoT and an alternative for the Mosquitto app, Nginx Proxy Manager, MQTT Explorer for exploring the topics and messages on your broker, MQTT IO for exposing GPIO modules and digital sensors via MQTT, and the Advanced SSH and Web Terminal app, which offers a supercharged SSH and web terminal access to the instance. Then there is the self-hosted application layer, with Jellyfin as the free software media system for movies, shows and music, Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, Calibre-Web for browsing a Calibre library, Bookstack as a simple and free wiki, FreshRSS, Mealie for recipes, Grocy for groceries and household management, Homebox for inventory of the things in your home, Grafana, Glances for system monitoring, JupyterLab, and the media request stack of Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, Prowlarr and qBittorrent. The presence of Example, FTP, a security-oriented app, an IoT MQTT bridge, a UPS tool and a file explorer alongside the media apps is a fair illustration of the point. These are not all upstream Home Assistant apps; many are addons for projects Home Assistant does not ship itself, which is the whole value of the mechanism.

The README and the docs site are both generated

Two things in the tree explain how the project maintains itself. The first is .README.j2, a Jinja template, and the fact that the repository's primary language is listed as Jinja tells you the catalogue README is generated rather than written by hand. That is how a repository with fifty addons keeps a listing that includes a per-addon version badge and a link to each addon's documentation without anyone editing it by hand. The second is the documentation site. There is a mkdocs.yml at the root, a build-site.sh script, a netlify.toml for deployment, and a requirements.txt that pins the two build dependencies, mkdocs at 1.6.1 and mkdocs-material at 9.7.7. The site is therefore the real documentation, built from the per-addon DOCS.md files, and the README is the index. The repository also carries linting configuration for the content itself, with .yamllint for the YAML and .mdlrc for the Markdown, which fits a project where the visible artefacts are configuration files and prose rather than code. The other notable top-level entry is requirements.txt for the documentation toolchain, which is separate from anything that runs in an addon.

Adding the repository, and what a community addon costs you

If the repository is missing, the README's instruction is to use the following URL to add it:

https://github.com/hassio-addons/repository

and to do it from the Home Assistant app store, which provides the option to add a repository. That is the entire installation procedure, and it is deliberately not a command line, because the app store is where a Home Assistant user expects to manage addons. The cost of an addon, then, is a different kind of cost, and the repository is clear about the shape of it. An addon wraps a container image that somebody else builds and publishes, and the addon configuration in this repository is what tells Home Assistant how to run it and which options to expose in the user interface. That means the version you get is the upstream project's version, updated on the upstream's schedule, and that your configuration options are the ones the addon author chose to surface. For a user who wants AdGuard Home or MQTT Explorer working in their stack with persistent storage and a sane default configuration, that is a good deal. For a user who needs a specific version pinned, or an option the addon does not expose, or a patch, the addon is the wrong level of abstraction and running the container yourself is the honest answer. The repository is MIT licensed with the licence in LICENSE.md, and it publishes no GitHub releases, so the addon versions live in the per-addon CHANGELOG.md files rather than in tags.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository if you run Home Assistant and want a single place to install community addons such as AdGuard Home, MQTT Explorer or a media server without wiring up containers yourself. Do not adopt it as a way to run a specific application, because each addon is a packaging of someone else's project rather than a fork of it, and it will track the upstream releases rather than your needs. Before you install an addon from it, read that addon's own documentation and check whether it is maintained, and note that the repository itself publishes no GitHub releases, so the last push on 2026-10-09 is the marker of activity.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. hassio-addons/repository on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README