Setting Up a Samba Share to Edit Home Assistant Configuration Files

To make editing configuration files easier, I wanted to be able to remotely edit them with my preferred text editor rather than using nano via the command line. Because I'm using Hassbian for my Home Assistant installation, I used the hassbian script for setting up a Samba share.

sudo hassbian-config install samba

The script shares the /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant directory–which contains the configuration files–to anyone on the network, but I wanted to make it a bit more secure. First, I modified the smb.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

The [homeassistant] section will be at the very end of the file. I modified it to this:

[homeassistant]
path = /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant
valid users = homeassistant
read only = no

Finally, I added a Samba password for the homeassistant user so the share can only be accessed by logging in as the homeassistant user with the correct password:

sudo smbpasswd -a homeassistant

Now to access the share and edit my configuration, I'll need to enter "homeassistant" as the user and the password I chose.