Whilst Home Assistant is already the most flexible smart home platform, with hundreds of built-in integrations, HACS is an optional additional tool to add even more integrations.
HACS stands for ‘Home Assistant Community Store’, and it allows you to download and install custom components from the wider Home Assistant community. It’ll also keep them updated for you. Home Assistant has long supported so-called ‘custom components’, which allows functionality beyond the standard built-in integrations, but HACS makes finding, installing and updating these much easier.
A couple of weeks ago, version 2.0 of HACS was released. This includes a new addon for those using Home Assistant Operating System or Supervised mode, which makes it easier to install. Updates are now handled via Cloudflare for improved performance.
As well as additional integrations, HACS also allows you to install different cards for your dashboards, and different themes. For example, Mushroom is a set of replacement cards which some prefer the look of.
Compared to the built-in integrations, which are maintained by the Home Assistant project, those in HACS are maintained by the community. This means that they may not be tested as rigorously as the official integrations, and so it’s important that you have regular backups in case things go wrong. Also, expect more bugs.
As for why integrations are only in HACS and not Home Assistant itself, there are a few reasons:
- It’s a niche service that may only apply to one country, or is of limited wider use.
- It uses scraping – this is where there isn’t a publicly available API for the service and so it scrapes the contents of web pages to work. These aren’t permitted in core Home Assistant integrations.
- It’s still in active development and not ready to be merged into the main Home Assistant release.
- It duplicates the functionality of a core Home Assistant integration but does so in a different way.
I’m currently using eight custom integrations through HACS, and I’ll discuss these in a later blog post. If you’re a Home Assistant user and haven’t already checked out HACS, have a look to see if you can extend its features even further.
