HTML5 Push Notifications

The html5 notification integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] enables you to receive push notifications to Chrome or Firefox, no matter where you are in the world. html5 also supports Chrome and Firefox on Android, which enables native-app-like integrations without actually needing a native app.

Requirements

The html5 platform can only function if all of the following requirements are met:

• You are using Chrome and/or Firefox on any desktop platform, ChromeOS or Android. Or you added your Home Assistant instance to your home screen on iOS 16.4 or higher.
• Your Home Assistant instance is accessible from outside your network over HTTPS or can perform an alternative Domain Name Verification Method on the domain used by Home Assistant.
• If using a proxy, HTTP basic authentication must be off for registering or unregistering for push notifications. It can be re-enabled afterwards.
• If you don’t run Hass.io: pywebpush must be installed. libffi-dev, libpython-dev and libssl-dev must be installed prior to pywebpush (i.e., pywebpush probably won’t automatically install).
• You have configured SSL/TLS for your Home Assistant. It doesn’t need to be configured in Home Assistant though, e.g., you can be running NGINX in front of Home Assistant and this will still work. The certificate must be trustworthy (i.e., not self-signed).
• You are willing to accept the notification permission in your browser.

Configuration

To add the HTML5 Push Notifications integration to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

Setting up your browser

Assuming you have already configured the platform:

1. Open Home Assistant in Chrome, Firefox or the webapp in iOS and load the profile page by clicking the My button above or by clicking on the badge next to the Home Assistant title in the sidebar. Assuming you have met all the requirements above then you should see a new slider for Push Notifications. If the slider is greyed out, ensure you are viewing Home Assistant via its external HTTPS address (and that you have configured the notify HTML5 integration in Home Assistant). If the slider is not visible, ensure you are not in the user configuration (Sidebar, Configuration, Users, View User).
2. Turn on the slider, and name the device you’re using in the alert that appears.
3. Within a few seconds you should be prompted to allow notifications from Home Assistant.
4. Assuming you accept, that’s all there is to it!

Note: If you aren’t prompted for a device name when enabling notifications, open the html5_push_registrations.conf file in your configuration directory. You will see a new entry for the browser you just added. Rename it from unnamed device to a name of your choice, which will make it easier to identify later. Do not change anything else in this file! You need to restart Home Assistant after making any changes to the file.

Testing

Assuming the previous test completed successfully and your browser was registered, you can test the notification as follows:

1. Click on the My button above.
2. From the Actions dropdown, search for your HTML5 notify action (notify.html5) and select it.
3. In the data text box enter: {"message":"hello world"}, then select the Perform action button.
4. If everything worked you should see a popup notification.

Usage

The html5 platform accepts a standard notify payload. However, there are also some special features built in which you can control in the payload.

Actions

Chrome supports notification actions, which are configurable buttons that arrive with the notification and can cause actions on Home Assistant to happen when pressed. You can send up to 2 actions.

message: Anne has arrived home
data:
  actions:
    - action: open
      icon: "/static/icons/favicon-192x192.png"
      title: Open Home Assistant
    - action: open_door
      title: Open door

Data

Any parameters that you pass in the notify payload that aren’t valid for use in the HTML5 notification (actions, badge, body, dir, icon, image, lang, renotify, requireInteraction, tag, timestamp, vibrate, priority, ttl) will be sent back to you in the callback events.

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
data:
  my-custom-parameter: front-door-open

Tag

By default, every notification sent has a randomly generated UUID (v4) set as its tag or unique identifier. The tag is unique to the notification, not to a specific target. If you pass your own tag in the notify payload you can replace the notification by sending another notification with the same tag. You can provide a tag like so:

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
data:
  tag: front-door-notification

Example of adding a tag to your notification. This won’t create new notification if there already exists one with the same tag.

  - alias: "Push/update notification of sensor state with tag"
    triggers:
      - trigger: state
        entity_id: sensor.sensor
    actions:
      - action: notify.html5
        data:
          message: "Last known sensor state is {{ states('sensor.sensor') }}."
          data:
            tag: "notification-about-sensor"

Targets

If you do not provide a target parameter in the notify payload a notification will be sent to all registered targets as listed in html5_push_registrations.conf. You can provide a target parameter like so:

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
target: unnamed device

target can also be a string array of targets like so:

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
target:
  - unnamed device
  - unnamed device 2

Overrides

You can pass any of the parameters listed here in the data dictionary. Please note, Chrome specifies that the maximum size for an icon is 320px by 320px, the maximum badge size is 96px by 96px and the maximum icon size for an action button is 128px by 128px.

URL

You can provide a URL to open when the notification is clicked by putting url in the data dictionary like so:

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
data:
  url: https://google.com

If no URL or actions are provided, interacting with a notification will open your Home Assistant in the browser. You can use relative URLs to refer to Home Assistant, i.e., /map would turn into https://192.168.1.2:8123/map.

TTL and Priority

Newer Android versions introduced stronger battery optimization, so notifications by default are delivered only when phone is awake. Options TTL and priority tries to help users solve those problems. Default value of TTL is 86400s and priority is normal. You can set priority to either normal or high. TTL is any integer value.

title: Front door
message: The front door is open
data:
  ttl: 86400
  priority: high

Dismiss

You can dismiss notifications by using html5.dismiss action like so:

target: ['my phone']
data:
  tag: notification_tag

If no target is provided, it dismisses for all. If no tag is provided, it dismisses all notifications.

Automating notification events

During the lifespan of a single push notification, Home Assistant will emit a few different events to the event bus which you can use to write automations against.

Common event payload parameters are:

You can use the target parameter to write automations against a single target. For more granularity, use action and target together to write automations which will do specific things based on what target clicked an action.

received event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.received when the notification is received on the device.

- alias: "HTML5 push notification received and displayed on device"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: html5_notification.received

clicked event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.clicked when the notification or a notification action button is clicked. The action button clicked is available as action in the event_data.

- alias: "HTML5 push notification clicked"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: html5_notification.clicked

or

- alias: "HTML5 push notification action button clicked"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: html5_notification.clicked
      event_data:
        action: open_door

closed event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.closed when the notification is closed.

- alias: "HTML5 push notification clicked"
  triggers:
    - trigger: event
      event_type: html5_notification.closed

Making notifications work with NGINX proxy

If you use NGINX as a proxy with authentication in front of your Home Assistant instance, you may have trouble with receiving events back to Home Assistant. It’s because of an authentication token that cannot be passed through the proxy.

To solve the issue put additional location into your NGINX site’s configuration:

location /api/notify.html5/callback {
    if ($http_authorization = "") { return 403; }
    allow all;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8123;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_redirect http:// https://;
}

This rule check if request have Authorization HTTP header and bypass the htpasswd (if you use one).

If you still have the problem, even with mentioned rule, try to add this code:

    proxy_set_header Authorization $http_authorization;
    proxy_pass_header Authorization;