You will have seen me reference HACS in a number of my blogs in the past few months. With the recent release of HACS 2.0 I wanted to just put together a short explanation of it, what risks it presents to your smart home but more importantly why you would be crazy not to make use of it.
The best way of looking at HACS if you ask me, is like you look at a food court in a shopping mall. You could visit McDonalds and eat their products and only their products (HA addon store) or you could choose from a plethora of other vendors with a wider selection of food from less known vendors. You might like them, and if so – awesome, or you might get food poisoning 😂
Either way, HACS has a HUGE number of integrations, cards, themes, scripts and templates that work brilliantly in Home Assistant, often developed by the community and bring a lot of features and functionality that simply is not available in the HA add-on store.
HACS has recently been inducted into the Open Home Foundation and has some of the most used add-ons, integrations and cards used within the Home Assistant ecosystem.
Installation
Installation of HACS, as you would imagine, is super simple as long as you’re comfortable with the terminal – however its a little different to a typical add-on. You will also need a github account prior to this, so set this up if you need to.
Step 1: The Install
- Go to this link which will add the HACS repo to your Home Assistant installation
- In the Missing add-on repository dialog, click Add.
- In the ‘Get HACS’ add-on, click Install.
- Once it’s installed, click ‘start’
- It’ll then ask you to restart Home Assistant
Next it’s time to set up the HACS integration…
Step 2: The Integration
- Go to Settings > Devices and Services
- Clear your browser cache (I know it sounds stupid, but without this step, you won’t see the add-on)
- In the bottom left, click ‘Add Integration’
- Search for ‘HACS’ and install it
- You have to ticket the boxes on the ‘acknowledgement’ page
- Next is the ‘Device Activation’ which is the OAUTH integration to github to allow you to download the HACS add-ons. Just copy and paste the code it provides, and follow the link, log into Github, paste the code and authorise HACS.
- Close the browser when Github tells you ‘You’re all set!’, switch back to your HA page and click finish on the entity pop-up.
As long as you’ve followed that, you should be able to see HACS on your side-bar and you’re then in a good place to make use of the awesome collection of community add-ons!
HACS 2.0
Just last month, HACS 2.0 was announced – over 4 years since 1.0 was released and you can certainly see the platform maturing. There been a number of useful changes which hopefully will encourage more users to take advantage and grow the Home Assistant community further.
New Dashboard
It now has a whole new frontend, closely resembling that of Home Assistant layouts (filtering, searching, sorting, etc) which makes it far easier to get the add-on you want
As you will have noticed from the installation HACS relied on Github for downloads, as well as infromations, etc. This meant a huge number of calls to the GitHub API, so they’ve now made the dataset available on Cloudflare, meaning fewer calls to GitHub, but downloads will still come from there.
Updates in HA
One of the biggest issues with HACS in version 1, was ensuring you still had the latest versions of the HACS-downloaded addons. You had to visit the HACS page update from there. From 2.0, all updates to HACS addons will appear in Home Assistant in the same way that updates are available for the HA addon store packages.
Popular HACS Add-ons
I thought it’d be useful to list some of the more popular add-ons, ones I use in particular and a quick description of what they do
- apexchart-card by @RomRider
- This is, as you’d expect, a card type that shows graphs, and makes them look stunning! Based on the Lovelace UI and Apexcharts.js, apexchart is highly customisable and when you’ve got to grips with it, very easy to use. I use it to show some of my solar statistics (30min time slots)
- Frigate Lovelace Card
- This is a really useful card for displaying camera output on your dashboard. You can have gallery of multiple cameras, and it supports zoning and downloading of clips. Very useful
- Mushroom
- It wouldn’t be a list of the top HACS packages with Mushroom. This is a collection of rather beautiful cards for your HA dashboard. They support light and dark themes, customisation of colours and icons and a GUI editor.
- Clock Weather Card
- Kind of self explanatory – but a very nice card showing weather date for today and forecasting the next 5 days. Super simple, but useful non-the-less
- Trashcard
- Despite the American-ised name, this allows you to connect to your local council’s bin schedule and display it in a super simple card and notify on them if you so wish. I’ve been using this for a good few months now and I find it very handy.
- Button Card by @RomRider
- Probably one of the most downloaded things from HACS, this really is a fantastic card. Based on lovelace you can pretty much do anything using this, from toggling entities, navigating around various dashboards, use custom css – it’s excellent
You will, during the course of my series on Home Assistant have seen me use numerous HACS packages to help with my build, including:
- Solcast (for use in Solar Forecasting)
- NodeRED (used to create more complex automations, for me collecting my Octopus Agile tariff details)
- Predbat Table Card (displaying how predbat is managing my battery)
- Bubblecard (This will be a future blog on version 2 of my mobile dashboard!)
A short blog, but hopefully shows you guys and gals how to make use of HACs in your Home Assistant installation. Catch you in the next one
