IRIS on Home Assistant (HAOS Add-on)

Have you ever wanted to run InterSystems IRIS as part of your smart home ecosystem? With the Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) add-on architecture, you can now run IRIS directly on your Home Assistant hub. This opens up incredible possibilities for local data persistence, Ambient AI, and advanced automation.

The Objective: Native IRIS on HAOS

The goal is to package InterSystems IRIS (specifically the Health Community edition) as a native HAOS add-on. This allows it to be managed, started, and stopped directly from the Home Assistant interface.

Setting Up the Repository

To get started, you need to add the custom repository to your Home Assistant Add-on Store.

Once added, you’ll see the “InterSystems IRIS Health Community” add-on available for installation.

Configuration and Exposure

The add-on uses network_mode: host to ensure that IRIS’s ports (1972 and 52773) are correctly exposed to your local network. You can configure the endpoint and other options directly in the HA UI.

Extra Credit: Scraping Metrics

One of the coolest things about running IRIS on HAOS is the ability to expose IRIS metrics as Home Assistant sensors. By using the REST platform in your configuration.yaml, you can scrape the IRIS Prometheus metrics API.

# configuration.yaml snippet
sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: iris_log_reads_per_sec
    resource: http://127.0.0.1:52773/api/monitor/metrics
    value_template: >
      {% set lines = value.split('\n') %}
      {% for line in lines %}
        {% if line.startswith('iris_log_reads_per_sec ') %}
          {{ line.split()[-1] }}
        {% endif %}
      {% endfor %}

Now you have IRIS performance data available as a first-class sensor in your Home Assistant dashboard!

Under the Hood

The add-on is powered by two main files: a config.json defining the HAOS integration and a simple Dockerfile pointing to the InterSystems container registry.

// config.json snippet
{
  "name": "InterSystems IRIS Health Community (HAOS)",
  "version": "0.1.1",
  "slug": "irishealth",
  "description": "Runs InterSystems IRIS Health Community as a Home Assistant add-on",
  "startup": "services",
  "boot": "auto",
  "arch": ["amd64", "aarch64"],
  "ports": { "1972/tcp": 1972, "52773/tcp": 52773 },
  "webui": "http://[HOST]:[PORT:52773]/csp/sys/UtilHome.csp"
}

# Dockerfile
FROM containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/irishealth-community:2025.1

Cheers to automated, intelligent homes powered by InterSystems!