Your second Automation
After the scratch on the Automation surface, let’s dive deeper and create the automation rule: Turn on the lights when the sun sets
We are defining a trigger to track the sunset and tell it to fire when the sun is setting. When this event is triggered, the service light.turn_on is called without any parameters. Because we specify no parameters, it will turn on all the lights.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
automation:
alias: Turn on the lights when the sun sets
initial_state: True
hide_entity: False
trigger:
platform: sun
event: sunset
action:
service: light.turn_on
Starting with 0.28 automation rules can be reloaded from the frontend and are shown by default. With hide_entity: you can control this behavior. It’s convenient if you are working on your rules, but when a rule is finished, and you don’t want to see that rule in your frontend, you can set hide_entity: to True. To set an automation to be disabled when Home Assistant starts set initial_state: to False.
After a few days of running this automation rule, you come to realize that this automation rule is not sufficient. It was already dark when the lights went on, and the one day you weren’t home, the lights turned on anyway. Time for some tweaking. Let’s add an offset to the sunset trigger and a condition to only turn on the lights if anyone is home.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
automation:
alias: Turn on the lights when the sun sets
trigger:
platform: sun
event: sunset
offset: "-01:00:00"
condition:
condition: state
entity_id: group.all_devices
state: 'home'
action:
service: light.turn_on
Now you’re happy, and all is good. You start to like this automation business and buy some more lights, this time you put them in the bedroom. But what you now realize is that when the sun is setting, the lights in the bedroom are also being turned on! Time to tweak the automation to only turn on the living room lights.
The first thing you do is to look at the entities in the developer tools (second icon) in the app. You see the names of your lights, and you write them down: light.table_lamp, light.bedroom, light.ceiling.
Instead of hard coding the entity IDs of the lights in the automation rule, we will set up a group. This will allow us to see the living room separate in the app and be able to address it from automation rules.
So we tweak the config to add the group and have the automation rule only turn on the group.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
group:
living_room:
- light.table_lamp
- light.ceiling
automation:
alias: Turn on the light when the sun sets
trigger:
platform: sun
event: sunset
offset: "-01:00:00"
condition:
condition: state
entity_id: group.all_devices
state: 'home'
action:
service: light.turn_on
entity_id: group.living_room
Christmas is coming along, and you decide to buy a remote switch to control the Christmas lights from Home Assistant. You can’t claim to live in the house of the future if you’re still manually turning on your Christmas lights!
We hook the switch up to Home Assistant and grab the entity ID from the developer tools: switch.christmas_lights. We will update the group to include the switch and will change our action. We are no longer able to call light.turn_on because we also want to turn on a switch. This is where homeassistant.turn_on comes to the rescue. This service is capable of turning on any entity.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
group:
living_room:
- light.table_lamp
- light.ceiling
- switch.christmas_lights
automation:
alias: Turn on the lights when the sun sets
hide_entity: True
trigger:
platform: sun
event: sunset
offset: "-01:00:00"
condition:
condition: state
entity_id: group.all_devices
state: 'home'
action:
service: homeassistant.turn_on
entity_id: group.living_room