145 Add-Ons, One Maintainer, and a Lot of Free Time
You've got Home Assistant running your lights, your thermostat, and maybe your coffee maker. But eventually you hit a wall: the official add-on store doesn't have the one tool you need, and you're not in the mood to build a Docker container from scratch. That's where community add-on repositories come in, and few are as packed as alexbelgium's collection of 145 add-ons—maintained, as the README openly admits, in someone's free time.
What It Does
This repository is a third-party Home Assistant add-on repository. Home Assistant lets anyone publish their own add-on repositories to share tools with the wider community, and this is one of those—a large one. The stated goal is to give you additional, high-quality add-ons that let you take your automated home further than the built-in options allow.
The numbers here are worth pausing on. The repository contains 145 add-ons, and they've been installed 264,114 times. The most-installed are Arpspoof (109,618 installs), Portainer (19,645), and Filebrowser (15,629). The architecture split skews heavily toward amd64 at 80 percent, with aarch64 making up the remaining 20 percent. The repo also runs automated linting, a builder workflow, and weekly stats generation, so there's real infrastructure behind the collection rather than a pile of unmaintained Dockerfiles.
Why It's Cool
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The maintenance burden is the story. The README is refreshingly blunt about what keeping this going actually takes: tracking upstream changes, tracking Home Assistant changes, and testing on real hardware. The maintainer notes they personally use only around 5 to 10 of their 110-plus add-ons regularly, which means they're spinning up test machines and even buying test services (like VPN subscriptions) they don't use themselves just to troubleshoot the rest. That's a level of commitment you don't often see spelled out.
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The catalog is genuinely broad. Arpspoof pulling over 100,000 installs tells you people are reaching for network-level tooling that Home Assistant doesn't ship natively. Portainer and Filebrowser round out the top three with container management and file access—the kind of utilities that make a home server feel like a proper server.
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It's built for real users, not just tinkerers. The install flow is the standard Home Assistant repository add, and there's a one-click badge for adding it directly. You don't need to understand the build pipeline to benefit from it, even though the pipeline (linter, builder, stats) is clearly there.
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The community signal is visible. The README highlights stargazers, contributors, and even a map of where stargazers are located. It's a small touch, but it frames the project as something people actually rely on rather than a personal experiment.
How to Try It
Getting started takes about a minute:
- In Home Assistant, go to Settings > Add-ons > Add-on Store.
- Click the three-dot menu in the top right and choose Repositories.
- Paste this URL and add it:
https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons
Alternatively, if you're reading this on a device with Home Assistant access, the README includes a one-click badge that adds the repository for you. If you prefer the manual route, the Home Assistant documentation on installing third-party add-ons walks through the same steps.
Once the repository is added, the add-ons show up in your store like any other. Browse the list, check the ones that match your setup, and install. The full collection lives at github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons.
Final Thoughts
This isn't a project you adopt wholesale—it's a catalog you pick from. If you run Home Assistant and you've ever wished the official store had one more tool, this repository is worth adding to your list of sources. The honest caveat is right there in the README: this is one person's free-time project, and the best way to keep it healthy is to support it if it saves you time. Whether that's a coffee, a PayPal donation, or just a star, the maintainer has been clear about what keeps the lights on. For a collection this size, that seems like a fair trade.