Container based zigbee2mqt setup - 1st attempt.

[umbral citrus]

So I am running HA in a container so I can't simply use the z2m addon. I installed zigbee2mqt and eclipse mqtt as a broker. They both seem to be working.

I went ahead and used the z2m dashboard to add my first device that paired successfully.

I went to HA and added MQTT integration, and it seems to connect to my broker ok... However.. I don't see the device I had added anywhere.

NOTE: When I setup z2m onboarding, I disabled the HomeAssistant checkbox because I thought that was for the add-on - would that explain it ?

[heavy vale]

NOTE: When I setup z2m onboarding, I disabled the HomeAssistant checkbox because I thought that was for the add-on - would that explain it ?
i dont have any experience with this type of setup directly but i imaginee that that option might have been the HA auto discovery payload. so yes

[heavy vale]

it looks like you can enable it in the z2m config yaml file by adding

homeassistant:
    enabled: true

Documentation

[umbral citrus]

Ok Yes, that was it.. it discovered the MQTT Bridge AND the device I had added ... The entities for the MQTT Bridge look good.. however the device (a water leak detector) has all it's sensors set to 'UNKOWN'

[heavy vale]

is it a battery powered sensor? its possible that it just hasn't announced anything since being added.

[umbral citrus]

Ok figured it out.. this was the the mqtt log:

2025-12-12 00:50:31] info:     z2m:mqtt: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee2mqtt/MiniLeakDetector', payload '{"battery":100,"battery_low":false,"linkquality":null,"water_leak":false}'
[2025-12-12 00:50:31] info:     z2m:mqtt: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee2mqtt/bridge/response/device/rename', payload '{"data":{"from":"MiniLeak","homeassistant_rename":true,"to":"MiniLeakDetector"},"status":"ok","transaction":"uzky8-2"}'

It sent the data to the new topic BEFORE it sent the rename request

I had to lick the device to get it to send a new msg 🙂

[heavy vale]

lol, one of thew few cases where that is a actually a solution.

[umbral citrus]

For the record.. this youtube video does a good job of all the steps required (although he misconfigures his mqtt frontend port to 8123, but corrects it in his docker compose by putting port : 8080:8123 ... I also didn't use his network setup (just relied on host networking): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C71SpthNkmU

I will close this thread.. thanks !

[heavy vale]

cool, I just use ZHA for my zigbee setup currently

[heavy vale]

no worries 🙂

[umbral citrus]

I tried to use ZHA but the dongle wasn't getting seen properly by the HA container, I had better luck in the mqtt container