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Have you ever wanted to supercharge your home assistant setup with custom integrations, themes, or scripts? Well, today I'm going to be updating one of my most popular tutorials to show you how to set up the Home Assistant Community Store, also known as HACS. So whether you're brand new to HACS, or looking to see what's changed in the latest version, you're in the right place.
Hi there neighbors, I'm Ryan, the Tech Guy, and welcome back to the Smart House, your destination for the coolest new smart home gear, and the best in smart home tutorials. Today, we're going to revisit one of my favorite tools for Home Assistant, HACS. It's been a few years since I made my original guide, and quite a bit has changed.
This video is a complete walkthrough of what HACS is, why you want to use it, and how to set it up from scratch. So if you run into any issues, or have questions, feel free to leave a comment down below, or join my Discord server. It's a great place to share knowledge and troubleshoot with other smart home enthusiasts.
So, HACS, or the Home Assistant Community Store, is the best way to share and discover community-driven projects for Home Assistant. It provides an easy way to browse, install, and keep track of custom integrations, themes, and front-end elements like cards. Now, if you've ever seen any of my other Home Assistant videos, most likely I've sent you to HACS to install custom integrations.
HACS offers a variety of custom updates for Home Assistant, including custom integrations. These add capabilities that are not available in the core Home Assistant library, like advanced sensors or unique automations. Themes, these allow you to personalize dashboards with different visual themes that can match whatever your style is.
Front-end plugins enhance the functionality and appearance of Home Assistant with custom levelle cards. Custom templates, as of right now, there are only a few, but the community can post more complicated Jinja templates for others to use within Home Assistant.
Now, if you haven't played with templating before, this is one of the most powerful parts of Home Assistant. Python and AppDev Scripts, these scripts allow you to execute custom logic or operations within Home Assistant, offering you even more powerful automation possibilities if you're an advanced user. Now one thing to note is you're not going to find any add-ons in the Home Assistant Community Store. That's because these can be installed from a custom repository already in the built-in add-on store in Home Assistant.
Now let's talk about what's changed in HACS 2.0. If you used HACS before, you'll notice a major difference that's more in line with other Home Assistant screens. The first thing you're going to notice is the new front-end. The updated interface now mirrors Home Assistant's native look and functionality, making navigation more intuitive and giving you more options to filter, group, sort, and search.
There's also faster downloads. Instead of requiring access to GitHub and using an authentication key, HACS 2.0 leverages a remote dataset that's stored in a CloudFlare R2 bucket. This makes HACS 2.0 significantly faster at retrieving information. They've also changed the way they handle updates from repairs. Updates for HACS components now appear right alongside your system and add-on updates in Home Assistant.
This ensures a unified update experience. Post-update, HACS also provides suggested repairs like reloading the dashboards or rebooting Home Assistant to ensure smooth operation and to remind you in case you forget to do this. Now one quick general note, HACS provides access to a vast variety of community-driven customizations. But it is an advanced tool that can add custom code into your Home Assistant installation. This could cause issues. So if you're new to Home Assistant or prefer a rock-solid setup, you might not want to play around with HACS items or set up a test environment.
Before we jump into the install, if you're enjoying this video and found it helpful, please make sure you like this video, subscribe to our channel, and ring the notification bell. That way, you can stay updated with all my latest smart home tips and tutorials. Now let's get HACS installed.
So before we get started, it's essential to know that your system is ready to go and up to date enough to use HACS. So before we get the installation started, let's talk about what's required to get HACS up. Now, you need to be running a relatively new version of Home Assistant. The actual requirement is anything newer than 2023.8.
The second thing we need to know is your installation type. So to do this, we need to go down to Settings and then About. So if you see Supervisor or Operating System listed here, then you're good to go. If you don't see those, you're probably running a different, more advanced version like Core or a Docker container. Those you'll actually have to follow the instructions listed out on the website, which is HACS.X-Y.
So for today's video, we're just going to be focusing on OS and Supervise. If you install this on a Raspberry Pi or a full system like a thin client, then you're most likely using this method. If you want to see how to do the old method, you can actually watch my old video and it shows you how to set this up using the scripts. Now that we know we've got the correct type of Home Assistant, let's get started with the install.
The quickest and easiest way to get this started is to follow the installation link either on the HACS installation website, which I've got linked down below, or you can go to this short link that I've created down here. When you type this into your browser, it's going to take you straight into the My Home Assistant link that will install the add-on required.
And for all two of you that are watching this on a TV, I've got a QR code that'll do the same thing. So clicking on that link is going to redirect you to a My Home Assistant page. If you haven't already used this before, this is a convenient way to click on an integration or a script that somebody else has written on a form or the community page and be quickly taken to the installation location in your Home Assistant instance.
So you'll only see the screen the first time that you've done this in a browser. Since this is my test environment, it's going to be using the local Home Assistant address, but I need to go ahead and replace this with my IP address because I have more than one Home Assistant on my network. You can just copy this from your Home Assistant URL above if necessary. Click Save, and then it's going to ask us if we want to open the link. Click that, and then it's going to ask us again for sure because you could be clicking on something malicious, so make sure you pay attention when you click these links, okay?
And then click Open Link. So it's going to take us to the HACS install add-on, so all you have to do is press the Install button, and then it's going to do everything else for us in the background. Now that that's done, we just click Start, and the installation process should begin. If you run into any problems, click the Log tab, and it will show you all the detailed log information for the installer. According to this, it says installation is complete.
So now we have to follow the instructions to say remember to restart Home Assistant before we can actually start using HACS. So we're going to Settings, go to the top right-hand corner, click the three dots, Restart Home Assistant, and Restart Home Assistant. Quick reload will not work. Click Restart.
Once Home Assistant is started back up again, you'll notice on your toolbar, HACS. This is the quick access to the Home Assistant Community Store, which you can go and remove if you want to, but I typically like to leave this on my toolbar, it makes it easier to get to. If for some reason it doesn't show up on here after you've rebooted, you might need to do a hard browser refresh.
So if you're on Windows, that's Control F5, or for Mac users, that's Command F5. This will clear the cache and freshly reload the page. So now that we've got it installed, let's take a quick tour. If you've used HACS before, you'll notice that this looks quite a bit different. The reason why it's kind of in this list format is because now we can use all of the Home Assistant's built-in filtering functions.
Let's start at the top left, click Filters. This allows us to change by either status or type. So status being Dashboard, Loveless Cards, Integrations, Templates, or Themes. Once we start getting things installed, you'll want to start using the status to see what needs to be updated, or items that are brand new to the HACS store.
If you want to see the latest and greatest of Loveless Cards, click New and Dashboard. This will show you all the stuff you don't have installed, and the items that have been updated most recently will be at the top. But you'll notice you'll have a status of Pending Update. These are for any items that need updating. But you'll notice you can't update them from here, and we'll look at how to update them here in a second.
Then, of course, we've got the Search Bar. So if you're looking for something very specific, you can just type it in here, and it'll show up immediately. On the right here, we have the Group Functions, which allows us to tell how we want to group these into. Right now, they're grouped by Status. But I can group them by Type, which will, again, make them grouped together by that Type like Dashboard, and then you can collapse them if you want to quickly navigate around.
And then finally, we've got Sort by. So, of course, you can sort them by name, how many downloads, how many stars, which is great for finding the most popular items. Activity, downloaded version, available version, status, and type. And then, lastly, over here on the right, we have a Cogwheel, which lets you add in some more columns. And then the three dots at the top, which allow you to go back to the documentation, the GitHub page, you can create an issue, add in customer repositories, dismiss anything that's brand new, or about.
Now, two items that are in the documentation that you notice aren't activated here are AppDaemon Scripts and Python Scripts because my test instance does not have either one of these installed, it automatically hides those. So if you do have Python script set up in Home Assistant or AppDaemon Scripts, then you'll actually see those as options as well. But again, that's for only super advanced users.
Quickly, let's all show you some of my favorite cards, and we'll look at what the installation procedure looks like to set up cards and integrations. So under integrations, these allow you to talk to additional pieces of hardware that you might have in your home. So, for example, I use a lot of the GoV integrations. I also use the Bamboo Lab one to talk to my X1 carbon printer.
So by installing this and then rebooting, I'd have the ability to see all the different temperature probes, the status, and then react to the different states of my 3D printer. Another really important one that I use is I have a couple of the TP-Link cameras in my house, is the Tapo camera controls. This expands the built-in TP-Link integration, allowing you to actually control pan-till-zoom cameras within Home Assistant.
So, by installing this and rebooting, you'd be able to control a pan-tilt-zoom camera within Home Assistant, see all the states and the different options for that camera. So in addition to that, there are a lot of other cool cards that you can find in the HACS store. So I'm going to show you one of my favorites, which is the Bubble Card. It's a super powerful card to use in Home Assistant UI that lets you overlay different cards on top of each other and interact with them.
So quickly, let's look at how to install an integration. So, to set this up, it's super easy, all you got to do is go down to the bottom right corner, click download, and click download again. It does allow you to select any version you want, including beta versions, but for most users, just click download. So now if we go back to the main screen, clear the search, and we look for status penning restart, you'll see the Tapo cameras integration is now in here.
So, we can't use this integration until we actually restart Home Assistant. On the other hand, if we look at dashboard elements, we can install these without rebooting Home Assistant. So I'm going to click on the Bubble Card, which is a really super powerful card that I've been using to kind of rebuild my Home Assistant dashboard. So we're going to click download on this one, click download again, again, I'm not selecting a specific version, and instead of being prompted to reboot, you're going to be prompted to reload your browser.
Now that we've got the Bubble Card installed, let's head over to our overview page, click add a card, and type in bubble, we'll see custom bubble cards now appear. These are super powerful cards that let you put sliders and other elements in your UI that really make your interface look quite fancy and quick and easy access to a lot of settings.
So this is a quick demo, we're going to go button, and then we'll do a slider, and I'm going to select my pegboard lights right here. There are a ton of advanced settings, which I'm not going to go into right now, but this card is great because you have a slider right here where you can adjust the brightness. You can click the light to go into your more information, to be able to select different colors, or long press on it, and it will turn it off.
So that's definitely a really cool card, and the best part is you don't even have to reboot Home Assistant, it just automatically gets loaded in the next time that you refresh the browser. So on that subject, let's go ahead and look at how to update and also how to use the built-in integration for repairs and for updates. So if you go to our settings, you'll notice that I now have a repair listed here for where a restart is required for my Topo integration.
So I click on that, it's going to prompt me to go ahead and restart Home Assistant. We'll also notice under updates, if I click show all updates, you'll see I've got three different GoV integrations that I've previously set up in other videos that it's asking me to update. So to update these, all we gotta do is click on them and say update, and it's going to give you a status just like any other add-on or integration in Home Assistant.
That's really cool and very easy to set, and very easy to update. Plus you don't have to go to two different screens to make sure you're actually up to date on all of your integrations. So now that I've updated those items, I'll even update my Team Tracker card and the integration. So then if I go back and I click on repairs, you'll see restart required, so I'll click on that and click Submit.
Now it's rebooting my Home Assistant instance, and here in a few minutes, everything will be back up to date, and then I can go ahead and use them again. So now that we've seen how to install and how to use HACS, let me show you some of my favorite cards and integrations in HACS. So we've already talked about Bubble Card, I think that's a super powerful UI enhancement. We've also got one called Auto Entities. This allows you to create filters that you can include or exclude certain items.
So say if you want to create a card that's going to show you all the entities that are offline or low battery, you can create that in this card. It'll automatically update the card, so you don't have to go in there and add a bunch of items in. It's a super powerful one, and I definitely would read through the documentation to make sure you understand all the ins and outs of what it can do.
Another great card is the Apex Charts. If you're a chart nerd, this lets you do almost anything you want with your cards. So I've got charts set up right now on my main instance showing all of my energy usage in a nice pie chart, so there's a lot you can do with this card. Again, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but I would follow the examples and feel free to ask folks online or chat GPT.
And then another super powerful but very advanced card is the Lovelace card mod. This one allows you to apply CSS styling to your existing cards and is one of those things that a lot of people use to make really cool custom cards, but unless you're a web dev, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. This is a card that I use occasionally, but usually with the help of those in the community.
So quickly, let's look at some integrations that I really like to use. We've already talked about the Topo one for the camera control. We've also got the Bamboo Labs integration, which I use to control and monitor my 3D printer. I've even got a custom card that I found which lets you kind of see everything in a nice view. And there's even a custom card that shows my AMS with all the different colors that are currently loaded in and the last thing I printed.
So these are really cool and really powerful options to have for a 3D printer. Now, I did a whole dedicated video on this one before, but the Mail-in Packages integration is awesome if you do receive a lot of packages. It lets you set up UI elements that allow you to see what packages are coming and going from your house.
It supports a lot of different things like Amazon, UPS, and FedEx. It can be really handy, especially during the holidays. The last one I'll talk about is if you're a fan of Eufy products, there's a Eufy security integration that's in here. You actually have to install a separate add-on, so make sure you follow the instructions, but it does expose a lot of the older Eufy cameras to Home Assistant and gives you control over some of the locks as well.
Not every one of my products is supported, but the vast majority are. Now, when putting this video together, I noticed quite a few of the integrations that I use are not in the HACS store. So quickly, I'll show you how to add in custom repositories so you can load in items that aren't listed in the HACS store.
So the first one we're going to talk about is the Expander card. This is a cool little card that allows you to hide other cards within it and then expand them out. Now, if you go search for this in the HACS store, it's not going to show up. So we have to actually add in the custom repository.
So if we