Home Assistant

Set Up Development Environment

You’ll need to set up a development environment if you want to develop a new feature or component for Home Assistant. Read on to learn how to set up.

Setup Local Repository

Visit the Home Assistant repository and click Fork. Once forked, setup your local copy of the source using the commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/home-assistant.git
$ cd home-assistant
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.git

Prepare Your Environment

Core dependencies

Install the core dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev libssl-dev

Different distributions have different package installation mechanisms and sometimes packages names as well. For example Centos would use: sudo yum install epel-release && sudo yum install python34 python34-devel mysql-devel

Additional dependencies exist if you you plan to perform Frontend Development, please read the Frontend section to learn more.

Setting up virtual environment (optional)

If you plan on providing isolation to your environment using venv. Within the home-assistant directory, create and activate your virtual environment.

If using Python < 3.6 pyvenv is the recommended method of setting up virtual environments, you’ll need to install the python3-venv package.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-venv
$ pyvenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

If using Python 3.6 pyvenv has been deprecated:

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Setup and Run

  • On Mac OS X and Linux (remember to activate your virtual environment before running setup, if you are using one): 
    $ cd home-assistant
$ script/setup

  • On Windows, you can use python setup.py develop instead of the setup script.

  • Run hass to invoke your local installation.

Logging

By default logging in home-assistant is tuned for operating in production (set to INFO by default, with some modules set to even less verbose logging levels).

You can use the logger component to adjust logging to DEBUG to see even more details about what is going on.

Developing on Windows

If you are using Windows as a development platform, make sure that you have the correct Microsoft Visual C++ build tools installed. Check the Windows Compilers section on the Python website for details. Validation using tox will fail if this is not done correctly.

Also, make sure to install or upgrade the setuptools Python package. It contains compatibility improvements and adds automatic use of compilers:

$ pip install --upgrade setuptools