Homeassistant

Table of Content

Installation via pip

If you don’t want to use a docker container (of course you don’t want to) and you can’t install homeassistant via your OS package manager, you can use pip.

First of all, create a virtual environment (venv) after that is done, you want to install the following three packages:

(<venv_name>) homeassistant@host:~$ pip install isal
(<venv_name>) homeassistant@host:~$ pip install zlib-ng
(<venv_name>) homeassistant@host:~$ pip install homeassistant

The packages isal and zlib-ng will speed up your homeassistant expirience a lot, spcially during the start up of the servers you will gain a lot of time.

Theming

Thems allow you to customize the look and feel of your homeassistant/dashboards/views.

Most of them are docuemented and can be easily found online, but there are some hidden ones as well.

Lets say, you have some door/window/garage/… sensors where you want to change the colors on specific states then you can add this to your sourced .yaml files for theems:

(syntax)

<my_theme_name>:
  primary-color: <hexcode/colorname>
  state-<domain>-<class>-<expected_state>-color: <hexcode/colorname>
  state-<domain>-<class>-<expected_state>-color: <hexcode/colorname>
  state-<domain>-<class>-<expected_state>-color: <hexcode/colorname>
  ...

The <domain> and the <class> can be found in the developer tools in your homeassistant.

In the “STATES” tab, search for your deivce and go through thelist till your find the entity that you want to act on.

<domain> is the string before the . in the Entity column. For example: binary_sensor, cover, … <class> can be found in the Attribtues column, mentioned as device_class. For example: door, garage, … <expected_state> is one of the states of the entity can have, also one shown in the column State

(sample)

my_theme:
  primary-color: lightblue
  state-binary_sensor-opening-on-color: red
  state-binary_sensor-opening-off-color: lightgreen
  state-binary_sensor-window-on-color: red
  state-binary_sensor-window-off-color: lightgreen
  state-binary_sensor-door-on-color: red
  state-binary_sensor-door-off-color: lightgreen

After you have the done your .yaml configuration, restart your homeassistent.

Now you have two options, either you apply the theme to your profile (in the profile settings), or what makes more sense, is to apply it on a view. For that go into the edit mode form a dashboard, open the view in edit mode and then you will see a bit below a combox where you can choose your theme. Select it and click save and you are done.

Remove Deivces from ZigBee integration

If you fully want to remove a divce from the ZigBee integration you will have to do more then only clicking on remove on the web interface. As if you only click there on remove, it will still kepp it in the device list.

To fully remove a device you would have to do the following, first you want to check where the device is in use and backup them:

    cd "${homeassistanthome_config_dir}"/.storage/
    cp $(grep -ri "${device_id_to_remove}" -l) ../

Next you just open the same files and remove all blocks containing the device-id:

    vim $(grep -ri "${device_id_to_remove}" -l)

and inside vim you search then for the blocks and remove them. If you are done with that, just restart your homeassistant instance and the device will be removed.

When your are done and everything works still as expected, remove the backup files.