Website home-assistant.io

The website you are reading now is the home of Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io. This is the place where we provide documentation and additional details about Home Assistant for end users and developers.

home-assistant.io is built using Jekyll and these available dependencies. The pages are written in markdown. To add a page, you don’t need to know about HTML.

You can use the “Edit this page on GitHub” link to edit pages without creating a fork. Keep in mind that you can’t upload images while working this way.

For larger changes, we suggest that you clone the website repository. This way, you can review your changes locally. The process for working on the website is no different from working on Home Assistant itself. You work on your change and propose it via a pull request.

To test your changes locally, you need to install Ruby and its dependencies (gems):

• Install Ruby if you don’t have it already.
• Install bundler, a dependency manager for Ruby: $ gem install bundler
• In your home-assistant.github.io root directory, run $ bundle to install the gems you need.

Short cut for Fedora: $ sudo dnf -y install gcc-c++ ruby ruby-devel rubygem-bundler && bundle

Then you can work on the documentation:

• Fork home-assistant.io git repository.
• Create/edit/update a page in the directory source/_components/ for your platform/component.
• Test your changes to home-assistant.io locally: run rake preview and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:4000
• Create a Pull Request (PR) against the next branch of home-assistant.github.io if your documentation is a new feature, platform, or component.
• Create a Pull Request (PR) against the current branch of home-assistant.github.io if you fix stuff, create Cookbook entries, or expand existing documentation.

It could be necessary that you run rake generate prior to rake preview for the very first preview.

Site generated by rake is only available locally. If you are developing on a headless machine use port forwarding: ssh -L 4000:localhost:4000 user_on_headless_machine@ip_of_headless_machine

Create a page

For a platform page, the fastest way is to make a copy of an existing page and edit it. The Component overview and the Examples section are generated automatically, so there is no need to add a link to those pages.

If you start from scratch with a page, you need to add a header. Different sections of the documentation may need different headers.

---
layout: page
title: "Website home-assistant.io"
description: "home-assistant.io web presence"
date: 2015-06-17 08:00
sidebar: true
comments: false
sharing: true
footer: true
ha_release: "0.38"
---

Content...Written in markdown. 

### {% linkable_title Linkable Header %}
...

There are pre-definied variables available but usually, it’s not necessary to use them when writing documentation.

A couple of points to remember:

• Document the needed steps to retrieve API keys or access token for the third party service or device if needed.
• Keep the configuration sample minimal by only adding the Required options. Full configuration details with further explanations should go into a seperate section.
• The description of all the configuration variables should contains information about the used defaults.
• If you’re adding a new component, for the ha_release part of the header, just increment off the current release. If the current release is 0.37, make ha_release 0.38.

Embedding Code

You can use the default markdown syntax to generate syntax highlighted code. For inline code wrap your code in `. For multi-line, syntax wrap your code as shown below.

 ```yaml
 sensor:
   platform: template

Note that you can replace `yaml` next to \`\`\` with the language that is within the block.

When you're writing code that is to be executed on the terminal, prefix it with `$`.

### <a class='title-link' name='templates' href='#templates'></a> Templates 

For the [configuration templating](/topics/templating/) is [Jinja](http://jinja.pocoo.org/) used.

If you are using templates then those parts needs to be [escaped](http://stackoverflow.com/a/24102537). Otherwise they will be rendered and appear blank on the website.

### <a class='title-link' name='html' href='#html'></a> HTML 

The direct usage of HTML is supported but not recommended. The note boxes are an exception.

```html
<p class='note warning'>
  You need to enable telnet on your router. 
</p>

Redirects

If you rename or move an existing platform or component, create the redirect. Add the old location of the page to the header of the new one.

---
...
redirect_from: /getting-started/android/
---

Images, icons, and logos

The images which are displayed on the pages are stored in various directories according to their purpose.

Not everything (product, component, etc.) has a logo. To show something for internal parts of Home Assistant we are using the Material Design Icons.