History

The history component will track everything that is going on within Home Assistant and allows the user to browse through it. It depends on the recorder component for storing the data and uses the same database setting. If any entities are excluded from being recorded, no history will be available for these entities as well.

To enable the history option in your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Basic configuration.yaml entry
history:

Events are saved in a local database. Google Graphs is used to draw the graph. Drawing is happening 100% in your browser. No data is transferred to anyone at any time.

Configuration variables:

• exclude (Optional): Configure which components should not be displayed.
  • entities (Optional): The list of entity ids to be excluded from the history.
  • domains (Optional): The list of domains to be excluded from the history.
• include (Optional): Configure which components should be displayed.
  • entities (Optional): The list of entity ids to be included to the history.
  • domains (Optional): The list of domains to be included to the history.

Without any include or exclude configuration the history displays graphs for every entity (well that’s not exactly true - for instance hidden entities or scenes are never shown) on a given date. If you are only interested in some of the entities you several options:

Define domains and entities to exclude (aka. blacklist). This is convenient when you are basically happy with the information displayed, but just want to remove some entities or domains. Usually these are entities/domains which do not change (like weblink) or rarely change (updater or automation).

# Example configuration.yaml entry with exclude
history:
  exclude:
    domains:
      - automation
      - weblink
      - updater
    entities:
      - sensor.last_boot
      - sensor.date

Define domains and entities to display by using the include configuration (aka. whitelist). If you have a lot of entities in your system and your exclude lists possibly get very large, it might be better just to define the entities or domains to display.

# Example configuration.yaml entry with include
history:
  include:
    domains:
      - sensor
      - switch
      - media_player

Use the include list to define the domains/entities to display, and exclude some of them with in the exclude list. This makes sense if you for instance include the sensor domain, but want to exclude some specific sensors. Instead of adding every sensor entity to the include entities list just include the sensor domain and exclude the sensor entities you are not interested in.

# Example configuration.yaml entry with include and exclude
history:
  include:
    domains:
      - sensor
      - switch
      - media_player
  exclude:
    entities:
     - sensor.last_boot
     - sensor.date

Implementation details

The history is stored in a SQLite database home-assistant_v2.db within your configuration directory if the recorder component is not set up differently.

• events table is all events except time_changed that happened while recorder component was running.
• states table contains all the new_state values of state_changed events.
• Inside the states table you have:
  • entity_id: the entity_id of the entity
  • state: the state of the entity
  • attributes: JSON of the state attributes
  • last_changed: timestamp last time the state has changed. A state_changed event can happen when just attributes change.
  • last_updated: timestamp anything has changed (state, attributes)
  • created: timestamp this entry was inserted into the database

When the history component queries the states table it only selects states where the state has changed: WHERE last_changed=last_updated

On dates

SQLite databases do not support native dates. That’s why all the dates are saved in seconds since the UNIX epoch. Convert them manually using this site or in Python:

from datetime import datetime
datetime.fromtimestamp(1422830502)

API

The history information are also available through the RESTful API.