---
layout: page
title: "Server-sent events"
description: "Home Assistant Server-sent events documentation"
date: 2016-04-08 07:00
sidebar: true
comments: false
sharing: true
footer: true
---
The [server-sent events](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events/Using_server-sent_events) feature is a one-way channel from your Home Assistant server to a client which is acting as a consumer. For bi-directional communication check the [RESTful API](/developers/rest_api/) and [Python API](/developers/python_api/).
The URI that is generating the data is `/api/stream`.
A requirement on the client-side is existing support for the [EventSource](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventSource) interface.
There are various ways to access the stream. If you have not set an `api_password` in the [`http`](/components/http/) section of your `configuration.yaml` file then you use your modern browser to read the messages. A command-line option is `curl`:
```bash
$ curl -X GET -H "x-ha-access: YOUR_PASSWORD" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" http://localhost:8123/api/stream
```
You can create a convenient view for this by creating an HTML file (`sse.html`) in the `www` folder of your Home Assistant configuration directory (`.homeassistant`). Paste this snippet into the file:
```html
Getting Home Assistant server events
```
Visit [http://localhost:8123/local/sse.html](http://localhost:8123/local/sse.html) to see the stream of events.
## {% linkable_title Examples %}
A simple way to consume server-sent events is to use a command-line http client like [httpie](https://httpie.org/). Installation info is on the site (if you use Homebrew, it's `brew install httpie`). Once installed, run this snippet from your terminal:
```bash
$ http --stream http://localhost:8123/api/stream x-ha-access:YOUR_PASSWORD content-type:application/json
```
### {% linkable_title Website %}
The [home-assistant-sse](https://github.com/fabaff/home-assistant-sse) repository contains a more advanced example.
### {% linkable_title Python %}
If you want to test the server-sent events without creating a website, the Python module [`sseclient` ](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sseclient/) can help. To install (assuming Python and pip3 are already installed):
```bash
$ pip3 install sseclient
```
A simple script to consume SSE in Python looks like this:
```python
from sseclient import SSEClient
messages = SSEClient('http://localhost:8123/api/stream?api_password=YOUR_PASSWORD')
for msg in messages:
print(msg)
```