Node Red Contrib Home Assistant

Various nodes to assist in setting up automation using node-red communicating with Home Assistant.

Project status

Project is going through active development and as such will probably have a few 'growing pain' bugs as well as node type, input, output and functionality changes. At this stage backwards compatibility between versions is not a main concern and a new version may mean you'll have to recreate certain nodes.

Getting Started

This assumes you have node-red already installed and working, if you need to install node-red see here

$ cd cd ~/.node-red
$ npm install node-red-contrib-home-assistant
# then restart node-red

Included Nodes

The installed nodes have more detailed information in the node-red info pane shown when the node is selected. Below is a quick summary

events: all

Listens for all types of events from home assistant

events: state

Listens for only state_changed events from home assistant

call service

Sends a request to home assistant for any domain and service available ( light/turn_on, input_select/select_option, etc..)

get state

Fetches the last known state for any entity on input

get history

Fetches HomeAssistant history on input

get template

Allows rendering of templates on input

Development

An entire environment with Home Assistant/MQTT/Node Red can be easily spun up using docker and docker-compose along with built in VSCode debug enabled.

Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/AYapejian/node-red-contrib-home-assistant.git
Install node dependencies as usual: cd node-red-contrib-home-assistant && npm install
Start the docker dev environment: npm run dev a. Note: First run will take a bit to download the images ( home-assistants image is over 1gb (yikes!) after that launch is much quicker) b. Note: Also first run load of HomeAssistant web interface seems very slow, but after first time it's also much faster
The npm run dev command will leave you with a terminal spitting out logs, ctrl+c out of this and it kills all the servers by design, just run npm run dev again to pick back up. The following services and ports are launched in the dev script

service	port mappings	info
home-assistant	`8123:8123`, `8300:8300`	exposed for local access via browser
node-red	`1880:1880`, `9123:9229`	exposed for local access via browser, `9123` is used for debugging. Includes default flow example connected to `home-assistant`
mqtt	`1883:1883`, `9001:9001`	exposed for experimenting, however shouldn't be needed as compose handles mappings internally
mqtt-listener		debug listener subscribed to topic `dev/#` of `mqtt` broker for log output
mqtt-dev-sensor		publishes every 10 seconds to a topic home assistant has a `sensor` platform for
mqtt-dev-binary-sensor		publishes every 30 seconds to a topic home assistant has a `binary_sensor` for

Node Debugger via VSCode

Optional but it's pretty nice if you have VSCode installed.

Open the project directory in VSCode
Go to the debug tab ( or cmd/ctrl+shift+d)
In the debug tab you should see an target for "Attach: Docker", run that guy and you can place debug breakpoints and changes will be reloaded within docker automatically
Open http://localhost:8123 for HomeAssistant (password is password by default). There is a default config which includes mqtt with a couple mqtt sensors that autopublish every 10 and 30 seconds by default. MQTT broker is also launched via docker, checkout the docker dir for more details if interested.
For node-red either open up via the HomeAssistant web link or left hand menu or just open a browser tab to http://localhost:1880

drogfild/node-red-contrib-home-assistant