Home Assistant

Automation

This page will talk about automating Home Assistant using the automation component. For more advanced ways of automation, see the create a component page.

Each part of automation consists of two parts: the trigger part and the action part. The final result will look something like this:

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[automation]
# Optional alias that the logs will use to refer to the entry
alias=Sunset notification

# Type of trigger and informatino for the trigger
platform=state
state_entity_id=sun.sun
state_from=above_horizon
state_to=below_horizon

# Action to be done when trigger activated
execute_service=notify.notify
service_data={"message":"The sun has set"}

Setting up triggers

Time-based automation

This allows you to trigger actions whenever the time matches your filter. You can setup filters to match on hours, minutes and seconds. Any filter that you omit will match all values.

Here are some example values:

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# Match at the start of every hour
platform=time
time_minutes=0
time_seconds=0

# Match at 4pm
platform=time
time_hours=16
time_minutes=0
time_seconds=0

Home Assistant checks your time filters every 3 seconds. That means that the value of seconds will only be 0, 3, 6, 9…60. Setting up a filter for `time_seconds=10` will never fire!

State-based automation

This allows you to trigger actions based on state changes of any entity within Home Assistant. You can omit the state_from and state_to to match all.

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# Match when the sun sets
platform=state
state_entity_id=sun.sun
state_from=above_horizon
state_to=below_horizon

# Match when a person comes home
platform=state
state_entity_id=device_tracker.Paulus_OnePlus_One
state_from=not_home
state_to=home

# Match when a light turns on
platform=state
state_entity_id=light.Ceiling
state_from=off
state_to=on

Setting up the action

Currently the only supported action is calling a service. Services are what devices expose to be controlled, so this will allow us to control anything that Home Assistant can control.

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# Turn the lights Ceiling and Wall on.
execute_service=light.turn_on
service_entity_id=light.Ceiling,light.Wall

# Turn the lights Ceiling and Wall on and turn them red.
execute_service=light.turn_on
service_entity_id=light.Ceiling,light.Wall
service_data={"rgb_color": [255, 0, 0]}

# Notify the user
execute_service=notify.notify
service_data={"message":"YAY"}

Putting it all together

For every combination of a trigger and an action we will have to combine the configuration lines and add it to an automation component entry in home-assistant.conf. You can add an optional alias key to the configuration to make the logs more understandable. To setup multiple entries, append 2, 3 etc to the section name. An example of a home-assistant.conf file:

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[automation]
alias=Sunset notification

platform=state
state_entity_id=sun.sun
state_from=above_horizon
state_to=below_horizon

execute_service=notify.notify
service_data={"message":"The sun has set"}

[automation 2]
alias=Turn lights off at 8am in the morning

platform=time
time_hours=8
time_minutes=0
time_seconds=0

execute_service=light.turn_off

[automation 3]
alias=Turn lights in study room on when Paulus comes home

platform=state
state_entity_id=device_tracker.Paulus_OnePlus
state_from=not_home
state_to=home

execute_service=homeassistant.turn_on
service_entity_id=group.Study_Room

All configuration entries have to be sequential. If you have [automation], [automation 2] and [automation 4] then the last one will not be processed.