2025.1.2

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0.90: Remote UI, Streams, User Groups

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

It’s time for Home Assistant 0.90 and it’s just wow. This release is so packed with cool stuff that it’s difficult to even know where to start, so let’s just jump in.

The first big feature is that Home Assistant Cloud now supports remote control. This allows you to check in on your home while away from home. Get a notification that motion was detected? Now you can easily check what happened and take action while away. It works end-to-end encrypted. Only thing needed to get started is to enable it. That’s it.

For more information on how it works, check out the documentation or listen to the latest episode of the Home Assistant Podcast.

Screenshot of the Remote UI preference. Screenshot of the Remote UI preference.

Camera streams for everyone

With this release we’re getting serious about cameras. @hunterjm has worked months on this and it’s finally ready for the first reveal. With the stream component, we will be able to forward streams from cameras in your house and repackage it into formats that your display devices understand. Previously, streaming cameras was limited to 2 frames per second and only in the frontend. For the first version we focused on the HLS format, which is supported by modern browsers and Chromecast. Each camera integration will need to be individually updated, for the first version we have only added support for the generic camera integration.

So what is possible now? You can start streaming your frontdoor feed on your TV when the doorbell rings or you can install a camera in the nursery and turn your Google Home Hub into a babymonitor.

To get started, add stream: to your configuration.yaml, configure the generic camera and start using the new camera.play_stream service.

User Groups

This has been a long time in the making, and has been worked on for a long time: you can now put users in groups to prevent them from being able to configure things from the UI. Users in the new “users” group will not see links to the configuration panel or to the developer tools. This is currently a UI feature, not a security feature. We’re working on making this a security feature by limiting access at API level too.

Smarter SmartThings

If you use Home Assistant Cloud, setting up SmartThings will now automatically leverage Cloudhooks. This means that you will not need to expose your instance to the internet to start using SmartThings. Yay for easy set up and thanks @andrewsayre! SmartThings support has also been added for 3 axis sensors and air conditioners.

Area love

This release also adds some more love to areas. Thanks to @Swamp-Ig, areas will now be included as room hints when you sync Home Assistant with Google Assistant. This should make setting up a breeze.

Areas can now also be used as targets in services. Just specify area_id instead of entity_id in your scripts or automations.

We’ve also made areas a part of the set up flow for integrations. When you add an integration, we will check which devices are added and ask you to configure them right away. That way you won’t forget.

VSCode extension

In case you missed it, earlier this week Kees Schollaart released the first version of his Home Assistant extension for the free text editor VSCode. It will connect to your instance and will provide you with entity ID autocompletion while editing your config!

New Platforms

Release 0.90.1 - March 21

Release 0.90.2 - March 26

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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 →

0.89: Nissan Leaf, PlayStation 4, Point alarm control, Owlet baby monitor

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

It’s time for release 0.89. It’s another great new release with some cool new features, bug fixes and improvements. The first cool new feature is that yet another car is integrated into Home Assistant: the Nissan Leaf. Both deConz and SmartThings integrations keep expanding to cover more devices.

This release introduces a new mobile app component. @robbiet480, who also works on the iOS app, has taken the best parts of the Home Assistant iOS app component and turned it into a standardized API that any mobile app can build upon. This will allow any mobile apps to integrate with Home Assistant with a great user experience. If you are a mobile app developer, please check the updated app integration docs. We will be fine tuning the API in upcoming releases. Feedback is welcome.

Noteworthy backward-incompatible changes

Custom Components file structure change: A significant change in how the “under the hood” of Home Assistant works has led to forcing platforms to be resolved based off the component path, if it exists.

Today, if you want, you can override the Hue light platform, but not the other parts of the Hue integration. If a future update evolves the Hue component, removing or changing internal methods that the custom platform relied upon, the custom platform will start failing (like this report).

To avoid this, we’re going to no longer allow custom components to be partial overlays (just a platform). Instead, if you want to override a built-in platform, you will need to override the whole component.

This is enforced by first resolving the platform as a component, and if it exists, limiting the lookup path to the component path.

Example: if I look up the hue component, and it is provided by a custom component, then all platform lookups will also be looked up in the custom component dir. The same works the other way around, if a user would only try to override hue/light.py but not hue/__init__.py, the custom platform will be ignored.

Paulus has written some detailed information about this change on the developers’ blog, if you’d like more information. The Great Migration by Paulus

Existing SmartThings configuration entries will be removed, including the SmartApp/Automation from the SmartThings app. Home Assistant will prompt you to configure the integration again or it can be invoked from the integrations page. The configuration process is the same as before. To prepare, have your personal access token and a mobile device with the SmartThings Classic App handy. This will not affect the naming of devices or entities and is a one-time inconvenience. The implementation switches over to the SmartApp access token to synchronize subscriptions during setup of the config entry, which cannot be done using the personal access token.

New Platforms

Release 0.89.1 - March 8

Release 0.89.2 - March 12

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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 →

0.88: Persons, Command line auth and event subscriptions

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Release 0.88 has landed. It’s been a busy two weeks with a ton of cool stuff and improvements.

This release introduces a new person component thanks to @MartinHjelmare. With this component, Home Assistant can be set up to track the people in your home. Each person can be linked to a user and multiple device tracker entities. This release does basic device tracker state merging, which will be evolved in the future. Device trackers merging their own states will be phased out in favor of persons. You can configure persons via the config panel. To get started, add the person component to your configuration.yaml file: person:. If you want to automatically stay up to date with the latest default Home Assistant components, you can now also add default_config: to your config.

This release also extends the event dev tool to include an event debugger. It allows you to listen to core events and get them printend to the screen. This makes it easy to find the event data that your remote is sending out.

Screenshot of the new event subscription tool.

We also have a new command line auth provider. This will allow you to use a shell script to validate users logging in to the system. This gives a lot of flexibility. For example, you can now authenticate against LDAP. More info in the documentation.

@andrewsayre has been working hard on extending the SmartThings support. This release brings sensors and climate devices into the mix. Awesome!

Noteworthy backward-incompatible changes

We have tightened config validation, so expect a couple of new warnings. Platform configuration will no longer allow to contain keys that are not supported. This should help with finding typos in your current and future YAML configs. This will currently fallback to a warning and will become a full error in the future.

Note for Lovelace custom card developers: if you relied on the availability of <paper-button> in your code, you will have to update it to <mwc-button> to get a similar component.

Note for custom component developers: We are moving to a new file structure. More information on our dev blog.

New Platforms

New Features

Release 0.88.1 - February 21

Release 0.88.2 - February 27

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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 →

hass-cli 0.5: Area, Device Registry and event CLI

Max Rydahl Andersen

With Home Assistant 0.87 out we got Areas and Device Registry UI thus it is time to do a release of hass-cli that allows you to operate on these in a terminal.

This release adds the following features:

  • Area list, create, delete, and rename
  • Device list and assign
  • Event watch

To get it run:

$ pip3 install homeassistant-cli

And once you have configured some of the new things you can like:

Create an area:

$ hass-cli area create Attic
-  id: 1
   type: result
   success: true
   result:
      area_id: 83977bdb16524579a856560925a791a7
      name: Attic

List all your areas:

$ hass-cli area list
ID                                NAME
295afc88012341ecb897cd12d3fbc6b4  Bathroom
9e08d89203804d5db995c3d0d5dbd91b  Winter Garden
8816ee92b7b84f54bbb30a68b877e739  Office
e6ebd3e6f6e04b63a0e4a109b4748584  Kitchen
f7f5412a9f47436da669a537e0c0c10f  Livingroom
bc98c209249f452f8d074e8384780e15  Hallway
83977bdb16524579a856560925a791a7  Attic

List devices matching a pattern:

$ hass-cli device list "Kitchen.*Light*"
ID                                NAME                      MODEL                    MANUFACTURER    AREA
f9cad07069c74d519fbe84811c91f1fb  Kitchen Light 2           LCT003                   Philips         e6ebd3e6f6e04b63a0e4a109b4748584
d02ec64623ae4407a80b903cbc061511  Kitchen Light 3           LCT003                   Philips         e6ebd3e6f6e04b63a0e4a109b4748584
820c9e511fce42ea92b228c18710aa56  Kitchen Light 1           LCT003                   Philips         e6ebd3e6f6e04b63a0e4a109b4748584
417dd42c0c764765aa29580d77b8b7ad  Kitchen Light 5           LCT003                   Philips         e6ebd3e6f6e04b63a0e4a109b4748584

Like with entity list you can filter and pipe results to get interesting things.

How about a inventory count?

$ hass-cli --no-headers --columns manufacturer,model device list | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
10 IKEA of Sweden      TRADFRI bulb GU10 WS 400lm
 8 Philips             SML001
 7 LUMI                lumi.sensor_magnet.aq2
 6 Sonos               Play:1
 6 Philips             LTW012
 6 Philips             LCT003
 6 Philips             Hue color spot
 6 Philips             Hue ambiance candle
 5 Philips             LWG001
 5 Philips             LCT012
 5 Philips             Hue color candle
 5 IKEA of Sweden      TRADFRI bulb E14 W op/ch 400lm
 4 Sonos               One
 4 Philips             RWL021
 4 Philips             Hue color lamp
 4 IKEA of Sweden      TRADFRI remote control
 3 Philips             Hue lightstrip plus
 3 OSRAM               Color temperature light
 3 LUMI                lumi.vibration.aq1
 3 IKEA of Sweden      TRADFRI transformer 30W
 ....

And then my favorite feature, assign of area to a device:

$ hass-cli device assign Kitchen "Kitchen Light 2"

or even more powerful, bulk-assign to any entity matching a certain pattern:

$ hass-cli device assign --match "Kitchen" Kitchen
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen table left'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen table right'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen left middle at window'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen front right at fridge'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen left back at hub'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen left back at bar'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen right back at sink'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen right middle at oven'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen Light 2'
  Successfully assigned 'Kitchen' to 'Kitchen Light 3'
  ....

And finally as a little bonus feature you can now watch the event bus from the CLI:

All events:

$ hass-cli event watch

or specific events:

$ hass-cli event watch call_service

At the moment the output is raw JSON, that will improve in a future release.

The full change list including bugfixes from community is as follows:

What’s Changed

New features:

  • Device, Area and event support 237ade8 @maxandersen
  • add minimal dockerfile 2b00bd7 Ben Lebherz

Bug fixes:

  • fix(entity): honor –columns in entity get 67397a1 @maxandersen
  • Fix result reporting from service calls 14fc952 @maxandersen
  • Remove pyaml and move to ruamel only for yaml df9f8c2 @maxandersen

Minor fixes:

  • fix: release 0.5.0 version 200a099 @maxandersen
  • fix: be pep440 complant 98320f8 @maxandersen
  • fix: fix lint errors eca26fa @maxandersen
  • fix: fix lint errors ffd2369 @maxandersen
  • enable deploy of git timestamped build 4b27a65 @maxandersen
  • Merge branch ‘master’ into dev caaf7b1 @maxandersen
  • add docker reference d3b64e8 @maxandersen
  • docs: add docs for area, device and event watch ee4f74a @maxandersen
  • Make dockerfile build from source + entrypoint b7f8764 @maxandersen
  • Fix lint issue 8bb0c9e @fabaff
  • Fix lint issues 58fdc83 @fabaff
  • fix bad typing 499b544 @maxandersen
  • fix editor formatting 86d9bf8 @maxandersen
  • Fix version 3765a03 @maxandersen
  • Fix version marker edbe4bf @maxandersen

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen

0.87: SmartThings, Areas and Entity Registry UI.

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant 0.87, our third release of the year. Besides a bunch of bugs squashing and performance improvements, we got some cool new features too.

Let’s start with the big one: we now support SmartThings. Via a custom app that can be installed inside SmartThings, you can now push the state of each device in SmartThings, as soon as it changes, to Home Assistant. No more fiddling with MQTT bridges or other solutions. Big shoutout to @andrewsayre for making this possible. Have a look at the SmartThings docs to get started.

New in this release is a new area feature thanks to @Kane610. Areas will allow users to organize their devices by their physical area, like kitchen or living room. This will unlock a whole new range of possible new features (of which none are implemented yet). With this release, users will just be able to manage areas in the configuration panel and place devices in areas via the integration page. In the future, we’re planning to add area based user permissions and a Lovelace area card. If you can’t wait to start leveraging areas today, @thomasloven has created a custom Lovelace card that can leverage areas.

This release also includes a UI to manage the entity registry. The entity registry contains all entities with unique IDs that Home Assistant has ever seen. It will allow users to quickly rename entities, change entity IDs or have Home Assistant forget entities that are no longer active.

We didn’t forget about the frontend in this release. In the last release we introduced Lovelace, so for this release we focused on bug squashing, performance improvements and usability. The YAML editor is now rendered using a full editor including line numbers thanks to @bramkragten. There is also a new system health component that will help users diagnose problems from the “info” developer tool. See changelog for the frontend.

In this release we have also upgraded the Material Design Icons to 3.3.92, which renames some icons. Make sure to check their changelog.

If you prefer a podcast over release notes, check out the Hass Podcast in which Phil and Rohan discuss each new Home Assistant release and keep a tap on what’s happening in the home automation space.

New Platforms

Release 0.87.1 - February 9

New Features

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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 →

Introducing Home Assistant CLI aka. hass-cli

Max Rydahl Andersen

When I started using Home Assistant (HA) I was missing a way to interact with HA via a command line (CLI). A CLI allows you to utilize the power of auto-completion, scripting and direct access.

Thus I started working on Home Assistant CLI, a project that was initially started by Fabian Affolter.

The great thing about hass-cli is that it uses the exact same API’s as the other UI’s and integration uses thus it makes a great complement to the Home Assistant family of tools.

Last week we released version 0.4, which provides majority of the features I was looking for to do from a CLI.

Feature highlights:

  • Get configuration info (hass-cli config)
  • List, get, edit and delete state for entities (hass-cli entity’)
  • Query history with relative time (‘hass-cli entity history’)
  • List and run services (hass-cli services)
  • Execute templates locally and remotely (hass-cli template)
  • Control over columns, sorting, etc. (hass-cli --columns attr1,attr2 --sort-by attr3)
  • Shell completion for most commands and arguments (hass-cli completion zsh)
  • Get logs (hass-cli system log)
  • Run discovery (hass-cli discover)
  • Show map for zone (hass-cli map)
  • Call raw api directly (hass-cli raw)
  • … and more

Usage

For the basic intro to hass-cli see the docs at github.

Installation

Install latest homeassistant-cli by pip:

$ pip3 install homeassistant-cli

or if upgrade use:

$ pip3 install --upgrade homeassistant-cli

or if you like an isolated install you can use pipsi

$ pipsi install --python python3 homeassistant-cli

or if you are adventurous you can build it from source at.

Changes since 0.1-0.3

The first thing is that the commands have been cleaned up to be more logcial/explicit.

$ hass-cli
...
...
Commands:
completion  Output shell completion code for the specified shell (bash or...
config      Get configuration from a Home Assistant instance.
discover    Discovery for the local network.
entity      Get info and operate on entities from Home Assistant.
event       Interact with events.
info        Get basic info from Home Assistant.
map         Print the current location on a map.
raw         Call the raw API (advanced).
service     Call and work with services.
system      System details and operations for Home Assistant.
template    Render templates on server or locally.

Rather than using generic terms (eg. get, list), the commands are now explicit and have further sub-commands.

The biggest change is that most operations, by default now use “table” mode. i.e., instead of getting a yaml or json dump you get a more concise view:

$ hass-cli entity list winter
ENTITY                           DESCRIPTION                STATE    
timer.timer_winter_garden                                   idle     
group.winter_garden_lights       Winter Garden Lights       off      
group.winter_garden_motionview   winter garden              off      
light.winter_garden_light_2      Winter Garden Light 2      off      
light.winter_garden_light_5      Winter Garden Light 5      off      
light.winter_garden_light_1      Winter Garden Light 1      off      
light.winter_garden_light_3      Winter Garden Light 3      off      
light.winter_garden_light_4      Winter Garden Light 4      off      
media_player.winter_garden       Winter Garden              paused   
sensor.lightlevel_winter_garden  Winter Garden Motion       1.0      
sensor.temperature_winter_garden Winter Garden Temperature  5.0

On top of better tables you can also use --sort-by to sort by an attribute and you can use --columns to control which attributes to show.

You can combine it all and do history querying with things like:

$ hass-cli --sort-by last_changed entity history \
  --since 50m  light.kitchen_light_1 binary_sensor.presence_kitchen
ENTITY                          DESCRIPTION      STATE
binary_sensor.presence_kitchen  Kitchen Motion   off
light.kitchen_light_1           Kitchen Light 1  on
binary_sensor.presence_kitchen  Kitchen Motion   on
binary_sensor.presence_kitchen  Kitchen Motion   off
light.kitchen_light_1           Kitchen Light 1  off

If you still want to get all the glory details you can use -o yaml to get the full details.

Frequently Asked Questions

A few frequent asked questions we’ve seen the last months are as follows:

Why would anyone use this ?

This is not removing or trying to compete with existing ways to access Home Assistant - this is a complementary way to access Home Assistant. If you like to use CLI’s and its power of auto-completion you’ll find hass-cli to be awesome; if not and you prefer the browser UI you just continue using it. We still use it for normal interactions, but when we want to be fast or script things hass-cli is great.

Why not just use the REST API’s directly via curl or similar ?

You can most definitely use curl or similar to access REST API directly - it’s basically what hass-cli does behind the scenes. hass-cli give though a few advantages. Firstly that you do not need to remember the exact commands, hass-cli have contextual help and auto completion to make it super easy to type out. Finally over time as hass-cli will get support for utilizing the more extensive websocket API’s hass-cli will be more consistent and simpler to use than using “raw” access via curl.

Does this only work with HTTPS and hass.io ?

No, it works with any Home Assistant that has REST API exposed - something that is done by default. In short - if you can access Home Assistant with your browser and see the UI hass-cli can communicate and control it too.

Thus http, https, hass.io, non-hass.io, etc. are all supported by hass-cli

Do I need to install Home Assistant to use this ?

No, hass-cli does not require Home Assistant installed on the computer you want to run it on. It should run on any install with Python 3.5 or higher on all major operating systems.

Does this work with client-generated certificates ?

It should, but we have not yet been able to verify it. If you would like to help us try it run with --cert <certificate.pem> and let us know if it works on issue #66.

Next steps

Personally the next feature I would like to add is more specific support for system control commands (like refreshing groups, restarting, etc.) but also for accessing hass.io add-ons. Also having an easy way to hook into the event bus (via websocket) to see what is happening live.

What would you like to see ?

Feedback

If you have questions for feedback you can put a comment on this blog, use the hass-cli forum thread or open issues or pull-requests at github.

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen

[Update: we are wrong] Nest locks users out of their own data

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Update 1 (Jan 24): We got some reports from people that they are still able to create accounts and generate the right keys. We just verified and this is the case. So for now you can still access your data, which is good. We’re still puzzled on the response to our tweet. And thanks to Reddit user /u/lefos123 for pointing out that they announced this updated link on Nov 2018.

Although it’s still working, we’re still scared about the future of the Nest API.

Some sad news for users with a Nest product: Nest is no longer accepting new developer accounts. This means that if you bought a Nest thermostat, you are no longer able to access YOUR data.

New Home Assistant users will not be able to integrate their Nest products. Home Assistant users that have already integrated Home Assistant with Nest are not affected.

We hope that Nest will implement a new program or add support for locally controlling the Nest thermostat, if they do, we will update this post. Until then, we can no longer recommend buying or using any Nest product.

0.86: New Lovelace UI and Zigbee Management Panel!

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant 0.86. And oh wow, this is an amazing release. First awesome thing: the Lovelace user interface, which we’ve been working on for the last 8 months, is now the default in Home Assistant. We have a lot to talk about, so we created a separate blog post just for the Lovelace release here.

Next up, we’ve updated the Home Assistant demo. It’s snappier, it’s snazzier, and best of all: it contains four fully functional Lovelace user interfaces that you can play with! Change the states or go in config mode and add, edit or re-organize the cards. We’ve set it up in such a way now that the demo will be automatically updated with the latest release of Home Assistant, so it will always feature the latest things.

Screenshot of the new demo. Screenshot of Lovelace in the new demo.

Zigbee management panel

This release includes a brand new Zigbee management panel to manage your Zigbee network thanks to the hard work by @dmulcahey with the help of @Adminiuga and @damarco. The new panel makes it easy to:

  • Issue Permit and Remove operations
  • Reconfigure Node, which will rebind and reconfigure the reporting for a device. Which can help solve issues.
  • Reading and setting cluster attributes. This is useful for viewing and setting things such as device sensitivity levels.
  • View and issue cluster commands. Note on this feature: support for commands with arguments is coming soon.

The Zigbee team is also planning a bunch of cool things for 2019. Direct device binding (directly pairing remotes to lights) is already in development and they are planning support for group management as well. Targeted and broadcast joins are also right around the corner (we’re waiting for a new Zigpy release). Exciting times for Zigbee users!

Screenshot of the Zigbee management panel. Screenshot of the Zigbee management panel.

Noteworthy backward-incompatible changes

Update: the entity ID one was too harsh, it’s now a warning.

This release also includes two noteworthy backward-incompatible changes. One is a follow-up on the slugify breaking change from last release. We did not update the validation check for config options that need to be valid slugs. This means that some of your config values might be invalid. Keep an eye at the console as we have a new message to tell you which ones are wrong.

The following things are not allowed in entity IDs:

  • No capital letters
  • No leading or ending underscores
  • No double underscores

This issue also impacts the entity registry, which could contain in some cases invalid entity IDs. Expect entity IDs to change if they contained a double underscore (which becomes 1) or if they started/ended in an underscore (which will be removed).

Another noteworthy breaking change (sorry!), is that the automation time trigger has been split into two: time and time_pattern. If you had a time trigger containing the keys hours, minutes or seconds, update the platform from time to time_pattern.

New Platforms

Release 0.86.1 - January 23

Release 0.86.2 - January 24

Release 0.86.3 - January 26

Release 0.86.4 - January 28

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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 →

Lovelace UI released!

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Today we’re happy to announce that our new Lovelace UI, which has been in beta for the last 8 months, is becoming the new default interface of Home Assistant 0.86. With Lovelace we’re taking a new approach to building user interfaces for Home Assistant. We’re no longer storing the look and feel of your UI in your configuration.yaml, requiring restarts for changes. With Lovelace we’re keeping the UI concerns in the UI1, unlocking a whole new set of features:

  • 24 cards to place and configure as you like.
  • UI Editor. A configuration UI to manage your Lovelace UI including live preview when editing cards.
  • Fast. Using a static config allows us to build up the UI once.
  • Customizable.
    • Cards have numerous options to configure how your data is presented.
    • Themes; even at a per card basis.
    • Ability to override names and icons of entities.
    • Custom Cards from our amazing community are fully supported.

In case you’re reading this and want to give it a try right now: we’ve updated the Home Assistant demo. It now features multiple Lovelace configuration examples. The demo is fully interactive, including the configuration UI (accessible via the menu in the top right). You can also access it by updating to Home Assistant 0.86.

For a deep dive into all the new features, check out the latest episode of the Home Assistant podcast, featuring an interview with Zack Arnett from the Lovelace team.

For an overview of all the different features, check out the Lovelace documentation.

1: If you prefer to write your Dashboard config in YAML, Home Assistant also includes an optional YAML mode.

Migrating to Lovelace

You have to do… nothing! If not configured, Lovelace will use the same algorithm to built-up the UI as the old UI did.

History

With Lovelace we’ve built a foundation that not only provides a lean and sleek interface, but will also allow us to add many new exciting features in the future. The main difference with the old UI is that we no longer store any UI concerns in the state machine.

When Home Assistant was started, I came up with an algorithm that would automatically organize the available entities in badges, cards and tabs; and then show that on the screen. Users demanded more influence; so over time, we’ve added a bunch of components and features of the backend whose main or sole purpose were to influence how the algorithm in the UI shows and organizes entities.

As this kept growing, I realized that we were on the wrong path. It was impossible to get an algorithm that would fulfill all needs and the backend shouldn’t be aware of anything in the frontend. It should just deliver the entities and the frontend should figure out how to display things together with the user.

At the same time as this was happening, we also had some discussions about the development of the frontend. Users wanted more control on what is shown, when it’s shown and how it’s shown. Eventually, @andrey-git came up with Custom UI for the old interface. This allowed users to do whatever they wanted. However, it was limited to power users.

Lovelace was built from the start to tackle these problems. The initial version completely dropped the algorithm and required users to add each card to their configuration. We went from a fully automatic UI to nothing. We launched it under the nomer “experimental UI” and it quickly gained traction. People loved the control and the ability to inject custom cards or entity rows at will.

The enthusiasm was great among our power users, however by switching away from an automatic UI, we were no longer beginner-friendly. A new user would open Home Assistant and they would see a blank, unconfigured UI. We realized that this had to be solved if we were to make Lovelace the default.

To solve this, we re-introduced our automatic algorithm. However, this time the algorithm generates a Lovelace configuration. If a user doesn’t like the automatic configuration, they can take control and configure it to their liking. When you take control, the automatic generated configuration will no longer be updated by Home Assistant, allowing the user to change each detail.

To make configuring your UI as easy as possible, Lovelace UI allows (custom) cards to include a config editor. This way the user will be able to quickly edit a card while a live preview shows how the changes look. If a card does not include an editor (yet), the user will be presented with a text editor in the browser.

Because of the ease to customize and share customizations, we’ve already seen a big community get created around Lovelace. They are very active in the #lovelace channel on our chat, and work is shared on ShareTheLove.io and the Lovelace section on Awesome HA.

Credits

Lovelace UI has been 8 months in the making and it has been a big undertaking. We’ve worked hard and are proud of being able to ship this first version. Lovelace UI would not have been possible without the following current and former members of the Lovelace team:

I also want to thank the community for adopting this so eagerly, building a ton of helpful tooling and examples and helping one another to create beautiful UIs for their homes.

Old UI

The transition to Lovelace should be painless for most users. If you are encountering issues, please let us know. For the time being, you will be able to still change back to the old user interface on a per-device basis by going to the info developer tool and following the instructions.

0.85: ESPHome, Plum Lightpad, OpenSenseMap

Paulus Schoutsen Paulus Schoutsen

Warning

Slugify changed, which can impact entity ID creation if the entities had names with either a - or characters outside of A-Z and the integration has no unique IDs. We now better handle the characters and substitute it with an alternative instead of removing that character.

Read this breaking change warning? 👆 Good. Let’s get started. This is the first release of 2019 and it covers a whopping 4 weeks, as we skipped the last release of the year to focus on friends and family. This is going to be a great year and we’re planning a lot of cool stuff. If you haven’t seen it yet, check the State of the Union to see what we have planned.

We’ve been so good at taking a break, that we pushed Lovelace as the default UI to 86 to make sure it’s super polished. We expect just bug fixes between 85 and 86, so feel free to check it out!

We’re also busy churning through the backlog of open PRs for Home Assistant (170 as of now), if you did a contribution over the past 4 weeks, we’ll get to it soon.

During the break we’ve launched the Home Assistant Data Science Portal. It explains all the data that Home Assistant stores and how you can get a data science environment going to explore it yourself.

This release also features native support for ESPHome, a system for managing ESP8266 and ESP32 microchips with a YAML config inspired by Home Assistant. The native API replaces MQTT for ESPHome firmwares and is designed specifically for Home Assistant and absolute efficiency. 🏎 It also comes with a Hass.io add-on to make configuration even easier.

New Platforms

Release 0.85.1 - January 11

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

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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