Home Assistant

Customizing entities

Changing the entity ID

You can use the UI to change the entity ID and friendly name of supported entities. To do this:

  1. Select the entity, either from the frontend or by clicking the info button next to the entity in the Developer Tools “States” tab.
  2. Click on the cog icon in the right corner of the entity’s dialog Entity dialog box.
  3. Enter the new name or the new entity ID (remember not to change the domain of the entity - the part before the .) Settings for entity.
  4. Select Update

If your entity is not supported, or you cannot customize what you need via this method, please see below for more options.

Customizing entities

By default, all of your devices will be visible and have a default icon determined by their domain. You can customize the look and feel of your front page by altering some of these parameters. This can be done by overriding attributes of specific entities.

Possible values

Configuration Variables

Looking for your configuration file?
friendly_name string (Optional)

Name of the entity as displayed in the UI.

entity_picture string (Optional)

URL to use as picture for entity.

icon string (Optional)

Any icon from Material Design Icons. Prefix name with mdi:, ie mdi:home. Note: Newer icons may not yet be available in the current Home Assistant release.

assumed_state boolean (Optional, default: true)

For switches with an assumed state two buttons are shown (turn off, turn on) instead of a switch. By setting assumed_state to false you will get the default switch icon.

device_class device_class (Optional, default: None)

Sets the class of the device, changing the device state and icon that is displayed on the UI (see below). It does not set the unit_of_measurement.

unit_of_measurement string (Optional, default: None)

Defines the units of measurement, if any. This will also influence the graphical presentation in the history visualization as continuous value. Sensors with missing unit_of_measurement are showing as discrete values.

initial_state boolean (Optional, default: None)

Sets the initial state for automations, on or off.

Device Class

Device class is currently supported by the following platforms:

Manual customization

If you implement customize, customize_domain, or customize_glob you must make sure it is done inside of homeassistant: or it will fail.

homeassistant:
  name: Home
  unit_system: metric
  # etc

  customize:
    # Add an entry for each entity that you want to overwrite.
    thermostat.family_room:
      entity_picture: https://example.com/images/nest.jpg
      friendly_name: Nest
    switch.wemo_switch_1:
      friendly_name: Toaster
      entity_picture: /local/toaster.jpg
    switch.wemo_switch_2:
      friendly_name: Kitchen kettle
      icon: mdi:kettle
    switch.rfxtrx_switch:
      assumed_state: false
    media_player.my_media_player:
      source_list:
        - Channel/input from my available sources
  # Customize all entities in a domain
  customize_domain:
    light:
      icon: mdi:home
    automation:
      initial_state: "on"
  # Customize entities matching a pattern
  customize_glob:
    "light.kitchen_*":
      icon: mdi:description
    "scene.month_*_colors":
      icon: mdi:other

Reloading customize

Home Assistant offers a service to reload the core configuration while Home Assistant is running. This allows you to change your customize section and see your changes being applied without having to restart Home Assistant.

To reload customizations, navigate to Developer Tools > YAML and then press the “Reload Location & Customizations” button. If you don’t see this, enable Advanced Mode on your user profile page first.

You can also use the Quick bar, and choose “Reload Location & Customizations”.

Alternatively, you can reload via service call. Navigate to Developer Tools > Services tab, select homeassistant.reload_core_config from the dropdown and press the “Call Service” button.

New customize information will be applied the next time the state of the entity gets updated.