Fixing Home Assistant and PyNaCl on FreeBSD

Here is a workaround for Home Assistant issues with PyNaCl 1.6.0 on Home Assistant 2025.11.1.

For a while HA has been requiring this version of PyNaCl and it is not available on FreeBSD. I use uv to manage my virtualenv and it wasn’t able to build it.

The workaround is as follows:

Install PyNaCL 1.6.1

1.6.1 builds in FreeBSD with a small tweak. Get inside your venv and build with GNU make. You probably already have it, but if not, first run

pkg install gmake

once gmake it’s available, go ahead and install PyNaCl with uv

MAKE=gmake uv pip install PyNaCl==1.6.1

Now PyNaCl is available at version 1.6.1, but HA still requires 1.6.0.

Patch mobile_app

We’ll need to manually patch the mobile_app package for now. Unfortunately, the Home Assistant team is very hostile towards any contributions that don’t involve their specific Linux monoculture, so I refuse to try to submit any contributions to this project.

cd into your virtualenv and find the site-packages/homeassistant/components/mobile_app route. Inside this, you’ll find a manifest.json file. Edit it and look for the line containing:

"requirements": ["PyNaCl==1.6.0"]

and patch it to be 1.6.1 instead.

After this, restart Home Assistant and mobile_app will now start with no problems.