Home Assistant is mighty open source tool and if you have a lot of devices or run a lot of computation i would recommend running it on a Pi 3, Pi 4 or even virtualize or containerize it.
But if you are like me and only want to control a few Relays over GPIO an have a Raspberry Pi Zero [non W], and a USB-NIC collecting dust, there are some Ways to get it running.
Officially HASS doesn’t recommend the Pi Zero, but there is an image for the Zero W on GitHub.
You just download the latest stable “haos_rpi0-w” image and etch it to an SD card, easy as Pi.
But if you have the Pi Zero [non W] there is no official Image, so you have to install the Core version on bare metal.
You can download and flash Raspbian without the GUI here:
plug in a , HDMI and a Keyboard and run
sudo raspi-config
set a new password and enable SSH
now you can run the PI headless
plug in a USB-NIC
find your PI’s IP address on your router
login on your Pi over SSH
now just follow the installation guide for installation of the Core-System on
if you have a problem creating the virtual environment just modify
python3.8 -m venv .
to
python3 -m venv .
If your installation was successful your Home Assistant should be running on port 8123
now you just have to edit systemd so HASS starts at every bootup
there is also a great guide by the Home Assistant team
Have fun with Home Assistant