How to integrate the Salicru SPS 500 ONE UPS with Home Assistant using Docker.

Well, since practically all my services are self-hosted on my server, I decided to buy a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) so that if the power goes out for any reason, the server won’t shut down abruptly and potentially damage a component, especially an HDD.

Since I only wanted it for the server and not much else, I chose the Salicru SPS 500 ONE, which is more than enough for the server and anything else I might connect to it in the future.

Once I had it connected, I started looking into how to integrate it with Home Assistant. I had previously seen people who had integrated UPS systems into their HASS, so I began to investigate.

First, the obvious part: for the UPS to communicate with our Home Assistant, we need to connect the UPS via USB to the device where we have Home Assistant running.

For our Home Assistant to communicate with the UPS, we need NUT, a tool that acts as a bridge between the UPS and Home Assistant.

In our case, we are going to run NUT in Docker along with Home Assistant in the same docker-compose.yml.

Detecting the New USB Device of the UPS

We will execute the following command:

(We need to have usbutils installed)

# lsusb

lsusb

Docker

Once we have these two figures, we will substitute them into our compose file (the complete compose is later in the post).

    devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb/001/003

Once we have this information, it’s time to deploy our two services in Docker:

With Traefik


version: '3.9'

services:

  homeassistant:
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /data/homeassistant:/config
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Madrid
    network_mode: host
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.http.routers.homeassistant.entryPoints=web-secure
      - traefik.http.routers.homeassistant.rule=Host(`homeassistant.crstian.me`)
      - traefik.http.services.homeassistant.loadbalancer.server.port=8123
      
  nut-upsd:
    container_name: nut-upsd
    image: upshift/nut-upsd
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - UPS_DRIVER=blazer_usb
    ports:
      - '3493:3493'
    devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb/001/003

Without Traefik


version: '3.9'

services:

  homeassistant:
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - /data/homeassistant:/config
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Madrid
    ports:
      - '8123:8123'
    network_mode: host
      
  nut-upsd:
    container_name: nut-upsd
    image: upshift/nut-upsd
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - UPS_DRIVER=blazer_usb
    ports:
      - '3493:3493'
    devices:
      - /dev/bus/usb/001/003

Important

In my case, the UPS driver is “blazer_usb” but not all UPS devices use the same driver. To find out which driver you would need if you are not using an SPS 500, you can check here by entering your model which will tell you the required driver.