Home Assistant

Home Assistant for everyone

Paulus Schoutsen

With Home Assistant, we want to help people live their life, while helping out in the background. I wrote about this in 2016 when I detailed my view on the perfect home automation. We’ve been working towards this ever since.

In 2019 we focused on “Make It Easier” (see State of the Union for details). We made Home Assistant easier to use, configure and to contribute to. Every time we make it easier, we become accessible to more people. There is still a ton we can make easier, and that’s great because 2020 is around the corner and we need things to do :-)

During Thanksgiving, Home Assistant made it to #1 on Hacker News, a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. The comments had lots of users chiming in with their positive experiences. One comment stood out to me and I wanted to share it:

Just wanted to say that my life as a quadriplegic would be 13.4 million percent more crap without Home Assistant. Being quadriplegic and having something as open as Home Assistant is absolutely amazing, I have automated absolutely everything in the house and home assistant has not choked once.

Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome.

I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were.

I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%.

Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.

– escapologybb on Hacker News

This is just great. I love how this user can live a more comfortable life. It’s really motivating.

I also really like the first reply to the above comment. It highlights how we tend to judge things from our perspective and that our perspective might not paint the whole picture.

Thanks for your comment. I came to this discussion with my blinkers on, so to speak, pre -judging how I need less automation in my world, and you give concrete evidence how someone's "meh" can be balanced by untold advantages (13.4 million, in fact) of such a system.

Thanks for making me eat humble pie and broadening my views. Sometimes more tech is helpful indeed.

Ps: The way you're applying it is creative and awesome too!

– cmroanirgo on Hacker News

As Home Assistant grows and evolves, let’s make sure we don’t judge the additions and changes based on just our own perspective and needs. Think about how it can help other (potential) Home Assistant users. It’s our goal that a privacy-focused home automation platform is within everyone’s reach, regardless of background, location or income.

Paulus

State of the Union 2019: Recap

Paulus Schoutsen

On November 13, 2019, 150 Home Assistant community members gathered at ING in Amsterdam for the Home Assistant State of the Union 2019.

That evening, Paulus Schoutsen (founder Home Assistant) and Pascal Vizeli (founder hass.io) presented what Home Assistant is up to, why we’re doing what we’re doing and what we got planned.

Video of the event is embedded below (it starts at 7:12):

Thanks

The State of the Union could not have been possible without the time and energy of the following people:

  • ING for hosting us once again ❤️
  • Erik-Jan Riemers for organizing – Rockstar ⭐️
  • Frenck for managing the livestream
  • Arjan Vroege for assisting the team

Announcements

We’re #10 open-source project in the world

GitHub posted their State of the Octoverse, listing Home Assistant as the tenth biggest project in the last year based on the number of contributors.

This is especially impressive because all the other things on the list are related to, or maintained by billion dollar companies.

Top 10 biggest open-source projects.Top 10 biggest open-source projects.

Home Assistant around the world ❤️

Improved Scenes

In Home Assistant 0.102 we’re launching a new scene editor. We’re also adding two scene services scene.apply and scene.create. First one allows you to apply a scene without prior defining it, the second one allows you to create a scene on the fly.

iOS app

@robbiet480 has submitted the new and updated iOS app to the app store and it will be available soon.

Source code

Android app

We have released a new Android app! Download it here. It’s being developed by @CedrickFlocon and we’re already seeing a ton of other contributors jump in. Awesome!

Source code

OAuth2 Account Linking

We’ve made it easier in Home Assistant for integrations to use OAuth2 account linking. This is available starting Home Assistant 0.102. Somfy is the first partner to use it.

It works using a small cloud service provided by Home Assistant Cloud. It is available to all users for free, no cloud account necessary.

Check the updated developer documentation if you want to add OAuth2 account linking to an integration.

Teamed up with Almond: privacy-preserving virtual assistant

We’ve teamed up with the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab to bring Almond to Home Assistant users. Almond has been upgraded with Home Assistant integration and users can now talk to Almond via the Lovelace UI.

You can run this standalone, as a hass.io add-on or via a version hosted in the cloud by Stanford.

Short description of what Almond is.Short description of what Almond is.

For more information, check the announcement blog.

Ada, voice assistant powered by Home Assistant

We have introduced a new project called Ada. Ada is a voice assistant that outsources all processing to the speech-to-text (new!), conversation and text-to-speech integrations in Home Assistant. You can pick your own providers for each integration.

You can run this standalone or as a hass.io add-on.

For more information, check the announcement blog.

Source code.

Architectural overview of Ada.Architectural overview of Ada.

Voice for Home Assistant Cloud

Nabu Casa has introduced a new beta service providing speech-to-text and text-to-speech services to Home Assistant Cloud subscribers powered by Azure Cognitive Services. This will make it easy to get started with Ada or use it to send spoken notifications to speakers in your house.

Z-Wave

We’ve been working with the Open Z-Wave developers on a new solution that will allow us to migrate to the new Open Z-Wave 1.6 relase and make it easier to stay up to date in the future.

We’re expecting to launch an MVP soon. This effort is driven by @cgarwood.

Source code

Frenck is joining Nabu Casa

Frenck will be joining Nabu Casa as the fourth employee working full-time on Home Assistant.

“If I could describe my dream job, it would be being a full-time open source developer; Helping the world to become a better place by dedicating my time & knowledge to create & innovate open source software solutions. Allowing everybody on this earth the privilege to enjoy those things for free.”    – Franck Nijhof (Frenck) on frenck.dev

Create automations using your voice

We have been able to leverage Almond’s neural network to allow users to generate automations using natural language. This means that you can now create an automation by telling Home Assistant to “turn on the lights when I get home” and we’ll convert it to the appropriate automation in Home Assistant.

Source code.

Screenshot of the create automation dialog. Screenshot of the create automation dialog.

Share the love ❤️

Home Assistant is the community and the community is Home Assistant. Help us spread the Home Assistant love, help others and share your knowledge on YouTube, blogs and other media.

Almond & Ada: privacy-focused voice assistant

Paulus Schoutsen

TL;DR:

  • Teamed up with Almond, available in Home Assistant 0.102.
  • Introducing Ada, voice assistant powered by Home Assistant integrations. Available as Hass.io add-on.
  • New beta speech-to-text and text-to-speech service for Home Assistant Cloud subscribers.

Voice assistants are a great way to interact with your house, ask a quick question, set a timer or control your devices. The more an assistant knows about you, your home and its other inhabitants, the better it is able to help you.

Today’s available virtual assistants work great, but they have a big problem: They store your data in the cloud, don’t provide APIs to allow other companies to build products on top and are run by companies whose core business is building profiles on their users to help serve ads and product suggestions.

The backbone to our homes needs to be one that keeps data local and has APIs allowing other companies to build on top. Innovation happens when many different people, with many different backgrounds, do many different experiments until we find something that sticks. This cannot be left to a single company.

Recently we got in touch with the Open Virtual Assistant Lab at Stanford University. In the last four years, they have been working on a virtual assistant named Almond. And it’s a perfect match for Home Assistant.

Read on →

0.102: Official Android App, Almond, Scene editor

Paulus Schoutsen

Home Assistant 0.102 is here ! It’s been quite the trip as we hosted our annual State of the Union last week, which took a lot of energy away from our release. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything to share, just that the notes might be a little less polished.

First, we had our State of the Union at the ING office in Amsterdam! It was great. You can watch it back on YouTube or keep an eye out for the blog post coming soon that will summarize all the announcements.

Alright, so what’s new? A lot.

Android App released!

At the State of the Union we announced that we have released the initial version of the official Home Assistant Android app. It’s still a work in progress, but the basic version already works.

It’s been developed by @CedrickFlocon and the source is available on GitHub. We’ve already seen some other developers step in, so that’s great! Keep it coming.

Read on →

0.101: Airly, Apprise, Sinch, Solar-Log, Microsoft Teams

Paulus Schoutsen

Hacktoberfest

It is almost the end of Hacktoberfest, and boy, it was a good one. We had a total of 1318 PRs merged in the last month. And most of them are in this release!

We had: 154 authors on home-assistant 184 authors on home-assistant.io 30 authors on home-assistant-polymer

A lot of thanks to all the contributors!

API Password and trusted networks

It is no longer possible to make authenticated requests using trusted networks or by appending ?api_password=X to the URL. You will now first need to get an authentication token and use that token to make requests.

These features were deprecated in Home Assistant 0.90 and 0.91 (released around April 2019). It was initially planned to be dropped in Home Assistant 0.96 (released July 17, 2019).

The support of configuring the auth providers for API Password and Trusted Networks via the HTTP configuration is also removed. It now needs to be configured in the auth provider section (docs).

Direct authentication meant that you could make an authenticated request without a bearer token by making the request from a trusted network or appending ?api_password=X to the URL.

These features are still available as authentication providers (docs).

You can use Long-Lived Access Tokens that can be created in the fronted on your profile page. These tokens will not expire and can be added in the header of the request. See the developer documentation for more info.

Screenshot of the Long-Lived Access Tokens interface in the profile page. Screenshot of the Long-Lived Access Tokens interface in the profile page.

Or you can use a webhook-based-integration. A webhook is a unique hard to guess URL that can be used to send data to Home Assistant. Requests made to webhooks do not need authentication. Your webhook should be available from the internet, if you have a cloud subscription, the cloud will take care if this. You can find the cloud webhook URLs on your cloud configuration page.

Hassbian

As you may have already read, we’ll be sunsetting Hassbian.

Hassbian was a superset of Raspbian optimized for Home Assistant. With limited time from the developers and easier alternatives as Hass.io it is time to sunset Hassbian.

A big thank you to all those who worked on Hassbian - specifically @landrash, who was the primary driver of this for so long, and @ludeeus.

For more info, read the blogpost

Device automations

This release includes improved support for alarms, covers, locks and sensors. A “for” option was added in release 0.100 which allows you to specify triggers for when a certain device has been in a certain state for a period of time, in this release we added support for it in the automation editor.

Screenshot of a device trigger with duration. Screenshot of a device trigger with duration.

Frontend

A lot has happened on the frontend; we had a ton of Hacktoberfest PRs that added localization to the frontend and made our user experience better. A special shout out to @springstan who did a lot of localization work, we now have the biggest part of our UI translatable!

Thanks a lot to all the contributors!

We now have our own confirmation dialogs thanks to @timmo001! No more ugly browser modals.

Screenshot of a confirm dialog when restarting Home Assistant. Screenshot of a confirm dialog when restarting Home Assistant.

In the last release, we changed all the JSON inputs to YAML inputs, this release we add a code editor to all the YAML and Jinja2 inputs. This makes it a lot easier to read and write YAML.

Screenshot of the service dev tools with YAML editor. Screenshot of the service dev tools with YAML editor.

The entity registry is now also migrated to a datatable so you can easily search and sort your entities so it is easier to find the one you are looking for.

Screenshot of the entity registry data table. Screenshot of the entity registry data table.

We improved the device picker in automations, you can now search them and see in what area the device is.

Screenshot of the device picker. Screenshot of the device picker.

mdonoughe added support the activate scene action in the automation editor.

Lovelace

Check the Lovelace changelog for all changes.

In other news

New Integrations

New Platforms

Release 0.101.1 - October 31

Release 0.101.2 - November 1

Release 0.101.3 - November 5

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Read on →

R.I.P Hassbian

Fredrik Lindqvist

It’s time for what was once the simplest way to install Home Assistant to retire.

R.I.P Hassbian

Some of you will probably wonder why Hassbian is being retired and I’ll try to give a proper motivation. First of is the age-old factor of time. I as the lead developer of Hassbian haven’t been able to give it the time and attention it requires, and there have been few others that have pushed the project further. The one exception being @ludeeus who’s done most of the heavy lifting when the image was retooled to use a proper apt package and repository. Second is that it’s no longer the best option for most to use as an installation method. Hass.io has surpassed Hassbian in almost all ways I can imagine.

Next Step for Hassbian

Since Hassbian has been around for quite a while, there are quite a few users that don’t want Hassbian to go away. To make this as easy as possible for those users, here’s the plan.

  • The repositories pi-gen and hassbian-scripts hosting the Hassbian projects files will be moved to a new organization.
  • A last release will be done by me mid Q4 2019. This image will be hosted under the pi-gen repository.
  • The pi-gen repository will be reworked to work with a standard raspbian image with minor modifications for anyone wanting to create their own “Hassbian like” image. This has always been possible, but the current repository is a bit out of date with the current layout of the Raspbian image.
  • The hassbian-scripts package will get a final release and will continue to be hosted on Gitlab. Some minor changes will be made to reflect the changes to the project.

Next step for Hassbian users

The Hassbian image has always aimed to be the same as a manual Raspbian Lite installation with some packages added. There won’t really be any big changes for all of the users of Hassbian and for documentation, please refer to the Manual installation on a Raspberry PI method.

Alternatives

If you want to continue using something similar, have a look at the manual installation on a Raspberry Pi since it is the base Hassbian was created from. For everyone else, I would wholeheartedly recommend Hass.io since it is what I personally use now (It’s what I had hoped Hassbian could have been but better).

Last but not least

Last but not least, thank you to all of those who contributed, in any way, to the Hassbian project and image.

0.100: Better Plex, Bye JSON, HERE Travel time.

Paulus Schoutsen

Welcome to the release notes of yet another wonderful release! No, we’re not going for 1.0, we’re doing 0.100! We feel like we’re not ready yet with our goals for 1.0, but we’re making progress every day. For a sneak peak of what we’re thinking about, check our blog Simple mode in Home Assistant 1.0.

Hacktoberfest

It is Hacktoberfest. This means that we’re spending the month celebrating contributing to open source. If you make 4 pull requests this month, you get a free Hacktoberfest t-shirt! More info and what to work on, check our Hacktoberfest blog post.

Average contributions per day have doubled for the month of October. There are now on average 40 contributions coming in each day. Breakdown is ~50% Home Assistant backend, ~37% documentation and ~13% the frontend. Most of these contributions you’ll see in the next release!

Graph of 420 PRs that got opened and merged in the last 14 days. Last 14 days of pull pequest throughput in the Home Assistant organization. (source)

State of the Union 2019

We’re going to have another State of the Union! It will be held at November 13, in Amsterdam. Like last year, it will be hosted by our friends at ING. I’m looking forward to talk about all the great things that are happening in Home Assistant land. We had 150 tickets available when we announced it on social media, and they were all gone in less than 24 hours!

We’re going to make sure that there will be a live stream available. We’ll announce that in time via the blog and social media. Some people are talking about hosting viewing parties across the globe. Keep an eye out on the social category on the forums for announcements. This would also be the place to announce if you are planning on hosting one.

Plex

@jjlawren has been on fire with the Plex integration. You will now be able to link your account via the official Plex account link feature.

Screenshot of the Plex user interface asking the user if they want to link with Home Assistant. Screenshot of the Plex user interface asking the user if they want to link with Home Assistant.

Lovelace

@iantrich fire has not been put out yet. This version he has also added many new functions to Lovelace! Check the Lovelace changelog for all changes. Some hightlights:

  • There are a lot more option for state filtering
  • We have a bunch of new UI editors
  • A new action url to link to external sites
  • Config panel: Disabled entities are now hidden by default.

Device automations

@emontnemery has been hard at work at further expanding device automations aided by @dmulcahey and [@Kane610]. This release includes improved support for Zigbee (ZHA) devices, sensors, binary sensor, switch and Deconz. One neat new improvement is the addition of a “for” option. This allows you to specify triggers for when a certain device has been on for a period of time.

Screenshot of a device trigger for a temperature sensor. Screenshot of a device trigger for a temperature sensor.

Automation editor

@emontnemery has added a bunch of functions to the automation editor, you can now use and and or conditions, and give your automation a description so you know why you did what you did.

Screenshot of an and-condition in the automation editor. Screenshot of an and-condition in the automation editor.

Devices

Device automations are now available on the experimental device page that we introduced in the last release. You can now see all the triggers, conditions and actions the device supports. Clicking on it will open the automation editor with the automation filled in, ready to edit.

Screenshot of a card showing device triggers to create automations from.

We also added the entity registry, so you can change all the settings of the devices entities in one place.

And, bonus, when you rename a device on the device page, it will now also rename the entities of that device if they contain the device name. When you are in advanced mode, it can also rename the entity id’s for you.

Goodbye JSON 👋

On the backend we have been using YAML for a long time, but on the frontend, we still used JSON for a lot of things. JSON is harder to write than YAML so we have aligned that. All data inputs on the frontend now accept YAML. You can still use JSON, as JSON is valid YAML.

This includes:

  • The automation editor
  • The script editor
  • Services data in dev tools
  • States in dev tools
  • Events in dev tools

Screenshot of a service action in the automation editor using YAML. Screenshot of a service action in the automation editor using YAML.

Thank You, @Amelchio

Core developer @amelchio is taking a break from working on Home Assistant. Amelchio has been a contributing member of the Home Assistant community for 2.5 years in which he made a grand total of 275 pull requests! Amelchio has worked on improving database performance and under his wing the Sonos, LIFX and Netgear LTE integrations flourished. He is an example community member, always available in the chat to help other people contribute to Home Assistant.

Thanks Anders, we’re going to miss you! ❤️

In other news

Hans Oischinger showcased how he can steer his vacuum cleaner to specific rooms in his house via his floorplan. Besides this tweet, he also wrote a great blog about it.

To improve discovery, we’re collecting discovery info of devices and services. Please help us gather zeroconf discovery info and HomeKit discovery info.

As always, this release of Home Assistant is accompanied with a new release of the Home Assistant Podcast:

New Integrations

New Platforms

Release 0.100.1 - October 10

Release 0.100.2 - October 12

Release 0.100.3 - October 21

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Read on →

0.99: Withings, Device Automations, launch Home Assistant Cast from Python.

Paulus Schoutsen

Happy 6th birthday to us! Yep, it’s been 6 years since the first commit, 6 years since we started our quest for a local and privacy foucsed home automation hub. And I think that we’re doing a pretty ok job 😏

It’s time for Home Assistant release 99. And this release is adding a bunch of new great features all over the place.

Welcome Bram!

Nabu Casa has hired Bram Kragten. Bram has been active in the Home Assistant community for a while and is one of the driving forces behind the Lovelace UI. He will work on the Home Assistant frontend full-time. He will focus on making it easier to manage your Home Assistant installation, make sure all of the frontend is translatable and drive our efforts on making the frontend accessible for visually impaired people.

This is possible thanks to all the people who subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud ❤️

Device Automations

We took a step back, looked at Home Assistant, and thought about how we could make it easier for users to create automations. We realized that there was room for improvement. We identified the following issues:

  • To write automations, users need to learn Home Assistant concepts like events, entities and services.
  • It’s difficult to discover what can be automated. For example, if you’re automating a long press on the “turn on” button on a Zigbee remote, you need to know to listen to the event “zha_event” and match against the Zigbee device identifier of your remote and the long press type.

So we put our inventor hat on and have come up with a solution that allows users to create automations in the concepts that they already know: devices. Now when a user starts configuring an automation trigger, it can pick device automation as a new type.

Screenshot of defining a device trigger. Screenshot of defining a device trigger in the UI.

The user starts by picking one of their devices that is integrated into Home Assistant. A second dropdown will now appear that contains all the possible triggers for this device. This list is populated based on the integrations that are linked to this device (ie. Hue & Light).

Device automations are available for triggers, conditions and actions. Today’s release supports lights, switches and Deconz. More to come in future releases as integration developers adopt it.

Big thanks to @emontnemery for driving this effort. He added initial support for device automations as a YAML-only feature in Home Assistant 0.97 and has worked hard to extend it in this release with UI support and support for conditions, actions and more integrations. Also a big thanks to @kane610 who added added support for device automations to Deconz which helped squash bugs and improve the design.

Frontend

There is a lot to talk here. Buckle up.

@thomasloven has built a brand new round slider from scratch for use in Home Assistant. It is using modern technologies to create a great experience. This component was so useful standalone that he has decided to release it as a standalone web component that anyone can use in their websites.

Screenshot of a light card showing a round slider.

Shout out to @iantrich who has been on fire in recent weeks squashing a ton of bugs and adding some nice features to improve the Lovelace experience. And a shout out to @SeanPM5 who has been bringing UX bugs and improvements to our attention. Our frontend team is seriously awesome.

Unused entities has been moved into the configure UI section and completely revamped by @bramkragten. It’s now a table, you can see a lot more info, you can sort it. If you are using Lovelace storage mode, you can select entities and add them to your UI directly from that screen.

Screenshot of the new unused entities page. Screenshot of the new unused entities page.

Now that we have a data table component, Bram also went ahead and used it in a new devices page. This page, still experimental, will allow users to see a list of all their devices and sort them by manufacturer, area or battery %. The goal is to create a one stop shop for device management.

Screenshot of the new devices page. Screenshot of the new devices page.

And there is a ton more, here are some of the other highlights:

  • Allow subscribing to an MQTT topic inside the MQTT dev tools @bramkragten
  • Option to display last changed in glance-card @iantrich
  • Add image option to glance card entities @iantrich
  • Allow controlling timer entities from the more info dialog @iantrich
  • Fill example data in dev tools @bramkragten
  • Stop effect in more-info-light @iantrich
  • Add vibration on mobile when controlling entities @bramkragten
  • Update Home Assistant logs when activating the info developer tool tab @bramkragten

Launch Home Assistant Cast from Python

Home Assistant now supports opening Home Assistant Cast from the backend. It is available as the service cast.show_lovelace_view. This allows you to open a view on your Chromecast as part of an automation. For example, show the frontdoor and who is home when your doorbell rings.

Note that Home Assistant Cast requires your Home Assistant installation to be accessible via https://. If you’re using Home Assistant Cloud, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise you must make sure that you have configured the base_url for the http integration.

Hass.io

Hass.io is now able to work with your secrets stored in Home Assistant. So now you are able to use !secret my_value inside add-on options like you can do inside configuration.yaml. For more info about how to define secrets, check the docs.

We have published a release candidate of HassOS that is compatible with the new Raspberry Pi 4. Download it here.

In other news

Home Assistant had a booth this year at the CEDIA home tech trade show. We spend a lot of time talking to manufacturers about local APIs, official integrations and better support for open source systems.

We also had some great drinks in the evenings with companies that integrate with Home Assistant. In this picture Konnected.io and Senic.

@timmo has released version 2.0 of his Home Panel. This is an alternative user interface for Home Assistant.

New Integrations

New Platforms

Release 0.99.1 - September 19

Release 0.99.2 - September 19

Forgot to include frontend update 99.1.

Release 0.99.3 - September 25

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Read on →

Happy 6th Birthday

Paulus Schoutsen

Dear community, happy sixth birthday.

It has been six amazing years

Thanks to all the people working on the core of Home Assistant.

Thanks to all the people working on the Home Assistant frontend.

Thanks to all the people working on Hass.io.

Thanks to all the people working on the mobile apps.

Thanks to all the people working on Hass.io add-ons.

Thanks to all the people who help with design and user stories.

Thanks to all the people who make the documentation possible.

Thanks to all the people active on the forums.

Thanks to all the people active in the chat rooms.

Thanks to all the people active on social media.

Thanks to all the people making videos helping people use Home Assistant.

Thanks to all the people making videos sharing their achievements using Home Assistant.

Thanks to all the people writing blog posts about Home Assistant.

Thanks to all the people involved in making the Home assistant Podcast.

Thanks to all the people moderating our community, maintaining its high quality.

Thanks to all the people working on running our infrastructure.

Thanks to all the people who help out with code reviews and maintaining our code quality.

Thanks to all the people building and sharing cool frontends build with Lovelace.

Thanks to all the people creating and sharing custom Lovelace cards.

Thanks to all the people creating and sharing custom components.

Thanks to all the manufacturers that work on integrating with Home Assistant.

Thanks to all the companies providing the Home Assistant project with resources: Nabu Casa, GitHub/Azure/Microsoft, CloudFlare, Netlify, Lokalise.co, CARTO.

Thanks to the Material Design Icons team for beautiful icons.

Thanks to all the people who support Home Assistant by subscribing to Home Assistant Cloud.

Thanks to all the people who share the Home Assistant love.

Thanks.

❤️

Paulus

0.98: Improved entity management, options and Home Assistant Alerts

Paulus Schoutsen

It’s time for the 0.98 release. As Home Assistant grows, some features will sometimes be left partially implemented, leaving things to be desired. In this release we’ve been focusing on tieing up these loose ends, sometimes with new features. Getting better all the time!

Entity Management

One of the things that we’ve been improving in this release is entity management. Historically we’ve let this up to integrations, but that caused users to learn multiple ways and more work for integration developers.

Generally entity management is not that important, you want all the entities created by your integrations! However this was less the case when we started migrating over device trackers. This became clear when we migrated over Unifi.

So in this release we’re introducing a couple of new features that are available for all entities in the entity registry and integrations that are set up via config entries.

The first feature is that it’s now possible to disable entities. If an entity is disabled, it will not be added to Home Assistant when an integration adds it. So now it will be easy to manage which entities will show up. This option is accessible from the entity registry

The second feature is a new option to automatically disable any new entities that an integration discovers. In the case of a device tracker, newly connected devices to the network won’t be added anymore. This option is accessible from the integration details page via a button on the toolbar at the top.

With these two features we are now at feature parity with the filtering features that are available in the device tracker integration. Next step will be polishing of the person integration to get all those shiny new device tracker entities under one roof.

Screenshot of integration system options. Screenshot of integration system options

Config Entry Options

We introduced config entries last year as our way as a generic way for integrations to store authentication and configuration. By allowing integrations to define the storage format, there are no more breaking changes for anything stored inside config entries!

Config entries also work great with people who prefer configuration.yaml. At startup a config entry is created/updated with the configuration.

With this release @kane610 added a new possibility for integrations to offer options in the UI. Options that previously required you to edit configuration.yaml can now be offered via the interface.

This release adds config entry options to Deconz and Unifi integrations with many more to come.

Screenshot of Unifi config options. Screenshot of Unifi config options

Home Assistant Alerts

Devices and services can receive updates that can cause integrations to break. This is frustrating and sometimes the cause can be hard to track down. Usually the users on forums/chat are aware and can help redirect people in the right direction, but that’s not a scalable solution!

So to combat this, we’re launching Home Assistant Alerts. Home Assistant Alerts is a website that will track known issues and explains in user friendly language what is going on. Alerts can be tagged with applicable Home Assistant versions, integrations and Python packages.

In the future we’re planning on integrating this directly in Home Assistant, so that users can be pro-actively notified of issue related to their configuration.

Docker base image change

If you run Home Assistant via Docker (not Hass.io) and are using the homeassistant/home-assistant container, the images are now using the same images as hass.io, which are using Alpine Linux instead of Debian.

The hass.io images are a third of the size of the old images and are heavily optimized thanks to the hard work by @pvizeli.

This change will only impact you if you were extending or customizing the image with Debian packages. If you want to continue to use the Debian based images, you can find the Dockerfile for the old images here.

For more background on this decision, see ADR-006.

Webscraping

With this release we have deprecated integrations that rely on webscraping. These will be removed from Home Assistant in a future release. Our scrape integration will remain part of Home Assistant.

Webscraping is fragile, breaks often requires frequent updates and there have been occasions where websites have banned our users.

Users that rely on these integrations can continue using them as custom components.

For more background on this decision, see ADR-004.

In Other News

Mason Made created a great video walking through her Lovelace UI with a fancy custom sidebar. Check it out:

Reddit user Skyfox2k has built a batcave for his robo vacuum. Once the vacuum starts, Home Assistant will open the door and the vacuum can come out to clean!

Photo of a robovacuum driving out of a tiny hole in the wall. Screencap of the batcave video.

New Integrations

New Platforms

Release 0.98.1 - August 29

Release 0.98.2 - September 2

Release 0.98.3 - September 4

Release 0.98.4 - September 4

Release 0.98.5 - September 6

We have been notified by Gregor Godbersen that our markdown renderer was vulnerable for an XSS attack if exposed to specially crafted markdown. This was introduced in the Home Assistant 0.98 release. We have verified that Home Assistant 0.98.0 does not render unsafe markdown, yet still wanted to make sure to issue an update as soon as possible.

More information in this frontend pull request.

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

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