Getting Started

Running Home Assistant requires that python3 and the package requests are installed.

Run the following code to get up and running with the minimum setup:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/balloob/home-assistant.git
cd home-assistant
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

python3 -m homeassistant

This will start the Home Assistant server and create an initial configuration file in config/home-assistant.conf that is setup for demo mode. It will launch its web interface on http://127.0.0.1:8123. The default password is ‘password’.

If you’re using Docker, you can use

docker run -d --name="home-assistant" -v /path/to/homeassistant/config:/config -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro -p 8123:8123 balloob/home-assistant

After you got the demo mode running it is time to enable some real components and get started. An example configuration file has been provided in /config/home-assistant.conf.example.

Note: you can append ?api_password=YOUR_PASSWORD to the url of the web interface to log in automatically.

Note: for the light and switch component, you can specify multiple platforms by using sequential sections: [switch], [switch 2], [switch 3] etc

Philips Hue

To get Philips Hue working you will have to connect Home Assistant to the Hue bridge.

Run the following command from your config dir and follow the instructions:

python3 -m phue --host HUE_BRIDGE_IP_ADDRESS --config-file-path phue.conf

After that add the following lines to your home-assistant.conf:

[light]
platform=hue

Wireless router

Your wireless router is used to track which devices are connected. Three different types of wireless routers are currently supported: tomato, netgear and luci (OpenWRT). To get started add the following lines to your home-assistant.conf (example for Netgear):

[device_tracker]
platform=netgear
host=192.168.1.1
username=admin
password=MY_PASSWORD

Note on tomato: Tomato requires an extra config variable called http_id. The value can be obtained by logging in to the Tomato admin interface and search for http_id in the page source code.

Note on luci: before the Luci scanner can be used you have to install the luci RPC package on OpenWRT: opkg install luci-mod-rpc.

Once tracking, the device_tracker component will maintain a file in your config dir called known_devices.csv. Edit this file to adjust which devices have to be tracked.

As an alternative to the router-based device tracking, it is possible to directly scan the network for devices by using nmap. The IP addresses to scan can be specified in any format that nmap understands, including the network-prefix notation (192.168.1.1/24) and the range notation (192.168.1.1-255).

[device_tracker]
platform=nmap_tracker
hosts=192.168.1.1/24