This custom component for Home Assistant expands the use of Labels in the system. The goal is for it to become the one, customizable, powerful system for all the grouping and targeting of entities that a user might ever need.
As the name implies I made it primarily for my own usage. Since I put in all that work though, I thought it might be useful to some other people as well, so I decided to share it here.
This is a beta release. Do not install this without proper backups in place. Due to the nature of the system, this component has to integrate very deeply with Home Assistant internals, making it uniquely susceptible to breakage. This means you have to be very careful with updates, always have a backup ready just in case.
Because of this beta state some changes in configuration options and system behaviour might be required in the future. Make sure to always read the release notes and make the necessary adjustments.
Currently the primary functionality of this component is to make it possible for labels to form hierarchies. Any label can become a child of any other label. This means that an entity that is assigned a child label by the user, will be assigned every parent label automatically by the system.
To use this component, follow the below steps.
Before doing anything, read the entire README first.
First create all the labels you might need, using the normal UI interface of Home Assistant.
As an example, let's use the following labels:
- Home
- Ground floor
- First floor
- Kitchen
- Pantry
- Living Room
- TV Area
- Bedroom 1
- Bedroom 2
- Office
- Desk Area
- Stairs
- Low light rooms
These are just area-related labels. You might also consider making more functional labels, like:
- Sensors
- Battery devices
- Important Battery devices
- Motion sensors
- Security motion sensors
- Water pumps
- Critical
Off course there are many other possibilities. The whole point of the system is that it is extremely flexible and can therefore fit a large group of diverse use cases.
Once you have your labels created, you need to get their label_ids. The easiest way is to go to the templates section in the developer tools and use the code:
{% for lbl in labels() -%}
{{ lbl }}: {{ label_name(lbl) }}
{% endfor %}Make sure to copy the result and store it safely.
In order to create relations between labels, you need to designate parents of every label. For identifying each label, you use its label_id. As an example, you put the following in your configuration.yaml file:
arturs_labels:
early_loader_hook: true
labels:
ground_floor:
parents:
- home
pantry:
parents:
- ground_floor
- low_light_rooms
living_room:
parents:
- ground_floor
tv_area:
parents:
- living_room
first_floor:
parents:
- home
stairs:
parents:
- ground_floor
- first_floor
office:
parents:
- first_floor
- low_light_rooms
# all the other area-related labels...
battery_devices:
parents:
- sensors
important_battery_devices:
parents:
- battery_devices
- critical
motion_sensors:
parents:
- sensors
security_motion_sensors:
parents:
- motion_sensors
- critical
water_pumps:
parents:
- critical
Each time you make changes to the configuration, you have to reload the component or restart Home Assistant.
Make sure to install Early Loader before installing this component.
This component can be installed using HACS.
- Add this repository as a custom integration repository to HACS.
- The integration should now be available in HACS.
- Install it like every other HACS integration.
- Restart Home Assistant.
After restarting Home Assistant make sure that everything works correctly. If it does, you can now assign labels to your entities, if you didn't do it previously.
One unfortunate limitation of the Home Assistant frontend is that it does not distinguish between assigned and effective labels. For this reason special virtual assign: labels are created. In order to change the entity labels, you change only those special labels, everything else will be applied automatically each time you save your changes.
You can target labels in your services. By targeting a parent label, you will automatically target all the entities of the child labels as well.
You can assign labels not only to entities, but also to devices. Every label, that you assign to a device, will be acquired by all its entities automatically.
The template label_entities(label_name_or_id) will allow you to get all the entities, for which the specified label is the effective label. The same is true for label_devices(label_name_or_id) with respect to devices. On the other hand labels(entity_id) will return only directly assigned labels to a given entity.
This extensive labeling system is meant to effective replace the need for areas. For this reason areas will be functionally disabled. You will not be able to target an area in service actions or templates. Instead just target the appropriate label.
To be able to target areas with Home Assistant Assist, special area emulation is performed. To enable it, simply list which labels correspond to areas. For example:
arturs_labels:
early_loader_hook: true
areas: [ground_floor, living_room, tv_area]
labels:
ground_floor:
parents:
- home
living_room:
parents:
- ground_floor
tv_area:
parents:
- living_room
battery_devices:
parents:
- sensorsThe voice assistant is specially patched to support full capabilities of the system. When you target a parent area, all devices from child areas will be automatically included.
External voice assistants are not supported. They tend to have their own area systems, which are not capable of arbitrary nesting.
The LLM-based assistants are currently not supported, but may be in the future.
If you want to support this project, then the best way to do it currently is to install it and report any bugs that you encounter.