node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Have Node-RED installed and working, if you need to install Node-RED see hereopen in new window.

Installation

Using the Palette Manager

Search in the Palette Manageropen in new window for:

node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket

Using npm from the command line

$ cd ~/.node-red
$ npm install node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket
# restart Node-RED

Home Assistant Add-on

The Community Home Assistant add-on ships with this set of nodes right out of the box and comes configured to connect to Home Assistant. No other information is needed and you're ready to start your first automation.

The add-on can be found here: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red#readmeopen in new window

Configuration

Place an Events: all node onto the workspace and edit the node. Click on the pencil icon next to the Server field.

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Search for a local Home Assistant instance or manually fill in the Base Url.

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Enter an Access Token on the server config node then Add/Update the Server Config and Events: all nodes and deploy. After deploying a green box with a status message, i.e. connected, stated_changed, should appear below the Events: all node. If you see an open box with the status of connecting or disconnected you probably have incorrectly entered the base URL or access token.

  • Base Url is the web address and port you use to access the Home Assistant frontend (e.g., http://localhost:8123, http://192.198.x.x, and http://example.duckdns.org).

  • Access Token is generated in Home Assistant there are instructions below on how to generate one.

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Changing the deploy type to Modified Flows or Modified Nodes will make it so when you deploy only the flows that you have modified will get reloaded. This helps if you have other flows on the workspace that you don't want to have reloaded everything time you change something else.

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If you find that new entities added to Home Assistant are not showing up in the autocomplete results try unchecking Cache Autocomplete Results in the server config and restarting Node-RED.

Generate Access Token

WARNING

The user used to create the access token must be in the administrator group for this package to function correctly.

Goto your Home Assistant home page and in the bottom left corner click on the blue circle with the letter in it. In the screenshot below it's the "J".

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  • Scroll down to the bottom of the page and it should look like the screenshot below and click on the Create Token Button
  • Give it a name, it can be anything you want to identify it
  • Copy the generated access token into Node-RED

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Creating a separate Home Assistant user for Node-RED and using their access token will give you the ability to track which entities were changed by Node-RED.

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Once you've configured the WebSocket connection using the Events: all node, this node should be removed for optimal NodeRed performance. Instead, prefer using the other node types provided by this package (Events: state, Trigger: state etc), or add an event type filter to the Events: all node to avoid overloading the websocket message queue.