Getting Home Assistant to Work with a Zigbee Dongle on Docker Desktop

For Windows users, Docker Desktop doesn’t support direct USB passthrough nicely. You might need to look into using serial over IP as a workaround.

Honestly, running Home Assistant in Docker on Windows can be a nightmare. I've had issues with networking and device passthrough, especially with WSL. If you're serious about using Home Assistant, I'd recommend using HAOS in a VM with USB passthrough instead. By doing this, you can manage your devices more reliably, or you could run the Sonoff on a Raspberry Pi and access it over the network, which has worked great for me.

You could run the Zigbee controller directly in Windows and have Home Assistant in Docker connect to it over the network. There’s a way to configure WSL to communicate better with your Windows setup, but it can be tricky. Just remember to check your firewall settings to ensure your HA ports are open.

The best route here is to use a virtual machine instead. It makes the setup far more straightforward, especially regarding device connections.