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

NOTE: node-red-contrib-home-assistant requires node.JS > 8.0 If you're running Node-Red in Docker you'll need to pull the -v8 image for this to work.

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

If you are running Node Red inside Hass.io addon/container you can use Hass.io API Proxy address http://hassio/homeassistant as Home Assistant server address (server node Base URL). This way you don't need any real network address.

======= For flow examples checkout the flows here

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

All Events

Listens for all types of events from home assistant

State Changed Event

Listens for only state_changed events from home assistant

State Trigger

Much like the State Changed Ndoe however provides some advanced functionality around common automation use cases.

Poll State

Outputs the state of an entity at regular intervals, optionally also at startup and every time the entity changes if desired

Call Service

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

Get Current 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 environment with Home Assistant/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 && yarn
Start the docker dev environment: yarn 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 yarn 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 yarn 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`

Docker Tips

If you run into environment issues running yarn run dev:clean should remove all docker data and get you back to a clean state
All data will be discarded when the docker container is removed. You can map volumes locally to persist data. Create and copy as directed below then modify docker-compose.yaml to map the container directories to the created host dirs below. See: ./_docker/docker-compose.mapped.yaml for an example or just use that file to launch manually

mkdir -p _docker-volumes/home-assistant/config
mkdir -p _docker-volumes/node-red/data
cp _docker/home-assistant/root-fs/config/* _docker-volumes/home-assistant/config/
cp _docker/node-red/root-fs/data/*  _docker-volumes/node-red/data

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).
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

Other Dev Tips

If you're using VSCode and annoyed that node-red html ( type="x-red" ) isn't syntax highlighted you can run force it by adding support. Below is for Mac, can do the same manually on any platform however, note that this is a hack as I couldn't find any other good way to do this.

# For VSCode
sed -i .orig 's/text\/(javascript|ecmascript|babel)/text\/(javascript|ecmascript|babel|x-red)/' "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/html/syntaxes/html.json"

# For VSCode Insiders
sed -i .orig 's/text\/(javascript|ecmascript|babel)/text\/(javascript|ecmascript|babel|x-red)/' "/Applications/Visual Studio Code - Insiders.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/html/syntaxes/html.json"

xAPPO/node-red-contrib-home-assistant