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Creating your first integration

Alright, so it's time to write your first code for your integration. AWESOME. Don't worry, we've tried hard to keep it as easy as possible. From a Home Assistant development environment, type the following and follow the instructions:

python3 -m script.scaffold integration

This will set you up with everything that you need to build an integration that is able to be set up via the user interface. More extensive examples of integrations are available from our example repository.

The minimum​

The scaffold integration contains a bit more than just the bare minimum. The minimum is that you define a DOMAIN constant that contains the domain of the integration. The second part is that it needs to define a setup method that returns a boolean if the set up was successful.

DOMAIN = "hello_state"


def setup(hass, config):
    hass.states.set("hello_state.world", "Paulus")

    # Return boolean to indicate that initialization was successful.
    return True

And if you prefer an async component:

DOMAIN = "hello_state"


async def async_setup(hass, config):
    hass.states.async_set("hello_state.world", "Paulus")

    # Return boolean to indicate that initialization was successful.
    return True

Create a file <config_dir>/custom_components/hello_state/__init__.py with one of the two codeblocks. In addition a manifest file is required with below keys as the bare minimum. Create <config_dir>/custom_components/hello_state/manifest.json.

{
  "domain": "hello_state",
  "name": "Hello, state!",
  "version": "0.1.0"
}

To load this, add hello_state: to your configuration.yaml file.

What the scaffold offers​

When using the scaffold script, it will go past the bare minimum of an integration. It will include a config flow, tests for the config flow and basic translation infrastructure to provide internationalization for your config flow.