--- title: "Philips Hue" description: "Instructions on setting up Philips Hue within Home Assistant." logo: philips_hue.png ha_category: - Hub - Light ha_iot_class: Local Polling ha_qa_scale: platinum featured: true ha_release: "0.60" --- Philips Hue support is integrated into Home Assistant as a hub that can drive the light and sensor platforms. The preferred way to set up the Philips Hue platform is by enabling the [discovery component](/integrations/discovery/). There is currently support for the following device types within Home Assistant: - Lights - Motion sensors (including temperature and light level sensors) Once discovered, if you have a custom default view, locate `configurator.philips_hue` in the States developer tool ( < > ) and add it to a group in `configuration.yaml`. Restart Home Assistant so that the configurator is visible in the Home Assistant dashboard. Once Home Assistant is restarted, locate and click on `configurator.philips_hue` to bring up the initiation dialog. This will prompt you to press the Hue button to register the Hue bridge in Home Assistant. Once complete, the configurator entity isn't needed anymore and can be removed from any visible group in `configuration.yaml`. When you configure the Hue bridge from Home Assistant, it writes a token to a file in your Home Assistant [configuration directory](/docs/configuration/). That token authenticates the communication with the Hue bridge. This token uses the IP address of the bridge. If the IP address for the bridge changes, you will need to register it with Home Assistant again. To avoid this, you may set up a DHCP reservation on your router for your Hue bridge so that it always has the same IP address. Once registration is complete you should see the Hue lights listed as `light` entities, the Hue motion sensors listed as `binary_sensor` entities, and the Hue temperature and light level sensors (which are built in to the motion sensors) listed as `sensor` entities. If you don't, you may have to restart Home Assistant once more. If you want to enable the integration without relying on the [discovery component](/integrations/discovery/), add the following lines to your `configuration.yaml` file: ```yaml # Example configuration.yaml entry hue: bridges: - host: DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS ``` {% configuration %} host: description: The IP address of the bridge (e.g., 192.168.1.10). Required if not using the `discovery` integration to discover Hue bridges. required: true type: string allow_unreachable: description: This will allow unreachable bulbs to report their state correctly. required: false type: boolean default: false filename: description: Make this unique if specifying multiple Hue bridges. required: false type: string allow_hue_groups: description: Disable this to stop Home Assistant from importing the groups defined on the Hue bridge. required: false type: boolean default: true {% endconfiguration %} ## Examples ```yaml # Example configuration.yaml entry specifying optional parameters hue: bridges: - host: DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS allow_unreachable: true allow_hue_groups: true ``` ### Multiple Hue bridges Multiple Hue bridges work transparently with discovery, so you don't have to do anything special to set them up. If you prefer to configure them manually and use multiple Hue bridges, then you need to provide a configuration file for every bridge. The bridges can't share a single configuration file. Add `filename` to your Hue configuration entry in your `configuration.yaml` file: ```yaml # Example configuration.yaml entry hue: bridges: - host: BRIDGE1_IP_ADDRESS filename: phue.conf - host: BRIDGE2_IP_ADDRESS filename: phue2.conf ``` ### Using Hue Groups in Home Assistant The Hue API allows you to group lights. Home Assistant also supports grouping of entities natively, but sometimes it can be useful to use Hue groups to group light bulbs. By doing so, Home Assistant only needs to send one API call to change the state of all the bulbs in those groups instead of one call for every light in the group. This causes all the bulbs to change state simultaneously. These Hue groups can be a `Luminaire`, `Lightsource`, `LightGroup`, or `Room`. The `Luminaire` and `Lightsource` can't be created manually since the Hue bridge manages these automatically based on the discovered bulbs. The `Room` and `LightGroup` can be created manually through the API or the mobile app. A bulb can only exist in one `Room`, but can exist in more than one `LightGroup`. The `LightGroup` can be useful if you want to link certain bulbs together. The 2nd generation Hue app only has the ability to create a `Room`. You need to use the first generation app or the API to create a `LightGroup`. Example: To create a `LightGroup` named `Ceiling lights` that contains the lights 1, 2, and 3, execute the following command: ```bash $ curl -XPOST -d '{"name": "Ceiling lights", "lights": ["1", "2", "3"]}' http:///api//groups ``` The `` is the string that is used to register Home Assistant on the bridge. You can find it in the `core.config_entries` file in your configuration\.storage path. `` is the IP address or hostname of your Hue bridge. You can find the IDs of your lights by executing the following command: ```bash $ curl http:///api//lights ``` Home Assistant will automatically detect your new `LightGroup` and add it to the interface.
To support Hue light groups, your bridge needs to have at least firmware 1.13 (released on June 3, 2016).
More information can be found on the [Philips Hue API documentation](https://www.developers.meethue.com/documentation/groups-api#22_create_group) website. ### Using Hue Scenes in Home Assistant The Hue platform has its own concept of scenes for setting the colors of a group of lights at once. Hue Scenes are very cheap, get created by all kinds of apps (as it is the only way to have 2 or more lights change at the same time), and are rarely deleted. A typical Hue hub might have hundreds of scenes stored in them—many that you've never used, and almost all very poorly named. To avoid user interface overload, we don't expose scenes directly. Instead there is a hue.hue_activate_scene service which can be used by `automation` or `script` components. This will have all the bulbs transitioned at once, instead of one at a time like when using standard scenes in Home Assistant. For instance: ```yaml script: porch_on: sequence: - service: hue.hue_activate_scene data: group_name: "Porch" scene_name: "Porch Orange" ``` | Service data attribute | Optional | Description | | ---------------------- | -------- | ----------- | | `group_name` | no | The group/room name of the lights. Find this in the official Hue app. | `scene_name` | no | The name of the scene. Find this in the official Hue app. *Note*: `group_name` is not a reference to a Home Assistant group name. It can only be the name of a group/room in the Hue app. ### Finding Group and Scene Names How do you find these names? The easiest way to do this is to only use the scenes from the 2nd generation Hue app, which is organized by room (group) and scene name. Use the values of room name and scene name that you see in the app. You can test that these work by using the `dev-service` console of your Home Assistant instance. Alternatively, you can dump all rooms and scene names using this [gist](https://gist.github.com/sdague/5479b632e0fce931951c0636c39a9578). This does **not** tell you which groups and scenes work together, but it is sufficient to get values that you can test in the `dev-service` console. ### Caveats The Hue API doesn't activate scenes directly; rather, they must be associated with a Hue group (typically rooms, especially if using the 2nd gen app). But Hue scenes don't actually reference their group. So heuristic matching is used. Neither group names nor scene names are guaranteed unique in Hue. If you are observing unexpected behavior from calling Hue scenes in Home Assistant, make the names of your Hue scenes more specific in the Hue app. The Hue hub has limited space for scenes and will delete scenes if new ones get created that would overflow that space. The API docs say this is based on the scenes that are "least recently used."