Home Assistant

Cloud

The Home Assistant Cloud allows you to quickly integrate your local Home Assistant with various cloud services. Any processing of services from other cloud services is handled by your local Home Assistant.

# Example configuration.yaml entry to enable the cloud component
cloud:

Once activated, go to the configuration panel in Home Assistant and create an account and log in. There is no need to configure your router or expose your instance to the internet in any other way.

If you are not seeing the Configuration panel, make sure you have the following option enabled in your configuration.yaml` file.

config:

Amazon Alexa

The Alexa integration allows users to control the entities via the Home Assistant Smart Home skill for Alexa. This means that you can say things like “Alexa, turn on the kitchen light” to control your local instance.

# Example configuration.yaml entry configuring Alexa
cloud:
  alexa:
    filter:
      include_entities:
        - light.kitchen
      include_domains:
        - switch
      exclude_entities:
        - light.living_room
      exclude_domains:
        - script

Configuration Variables

alexa

(map)(Optional)Configuration options for the Amazon Alexa integration.

filter

(map)(Optional)Filters for entities to include/exclude from Alexa.

include_entities

(list)(Optional)Entity IDs to include.

include_domains

(list)(Optional)Domains to include.

exclude_entities

(list)(Optional)Entity IDs to exclude.

exclude_domains

(list)(Optional)Domains to exclude.

Possible values for customize

Attribute Description
alexa_hidden Hide the entity from the Alexa smart home devices.
alexa_name Defines name of the entity for a Alexa smart home device. Useful if you have an entity with a friendly name in a local language that you want to access using an English sounding name.
alexa_description The description of the device in the Alexa smart home device list.
alexa_display_categories Set displayCategories, useful for things like media_player (TV/SPEAKERS) or scene (ACTIVITY_TRIGGER/SCENE_TRIGGER). More info can be found here.

Available domains

Currently, the following domains are available to be used with Alexa:

  • alert
  • automation (enables/disables)
  • cover
  • fan (supports on/off and set speed)
  • group
  • input_boolean
  • light
  • lock (lock and unlock, but unlock is untested as Amazon has disabled unlock for now)
  • media_player (play, pause, stop, set volume, adjust volume, next track and previous track)
  • scene
  • script (enables/disables)
  • switch

Frequently Asked Questions

You can find a list of frequently asked questions (and their answers) in this blog post.