home-assistant.io/source/_integrations/hue.markdown

title, description, logo, ha_category, ha_iot_class, ha_qa_scale, featured, ha_release

title	description	logo	ha_category	ha_iot_class	ha_qa_scale	featured	ha_release
Philips Hue	Instructions on setting up Philips Hue within Home Assistant.	philips_hue.png	Hub Light	Local Polling	platinum	true	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.

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. 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, add the following lines to your configuration.yaml file:

# 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

# 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:

# 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:

$ curl -XPOST -d '{"name": "Ceiling lights", "lights": ["1", "2", "3"]}' http://<bridge>/api/<username>/groups

The <username> 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. <bridge> is the IP address or hostname of your Hue bridge.

You can find the IDs of your lights by executing the following command:

$ curl http://<bridge>/api/<username>/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 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:

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. 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."