Signal Messenger


The signal_messenger integration uses the Signal Messenger REST API to deliver notifications from Home Assistant to your Android or iOS device.

Setup

The requirements are:

  • You need to set up the Signal Messenger REST API.
  • You need a spare phone number to register with the Signal Messenger service.

Please follow those instructions, to set up the Signal Messenger REST API.

Configuration

To send Signal Messenger notifications with Home Assistant, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry for Signal Messenger 
notify:
  - name: signal
    platform: signal_messenger
    url: "http://127.0.0.1:8080" # the URL where the Signal Messenger REST API is listening 
    number: "YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER" # the sender number
    recipients: # one or more recipients
      - "RECIPIENT1"

Both phone numbers and Signal Messenger groups can be added to the recipientslist. However, it’s not possible to mix phone numbers and Signal Messenger groups in a single notifier. If you would like to send messages to individual phone numbers and Signal Messenger groups, separate notifiers need to be created.

To obtain the Signal Messenger group ids, follow this guide.

Configuration Variables

name string (Optional, default: notify)

Setting the optional parameter name allows multiple notifiers to be created. The notifier will bind to the service notify.NOTIFIER_NAME.

url string Required

The URL where the Signal Messenger REST API listens for incoming requests.

number string Required

The sender number.

recipients string Required

A list of recipients (either phone numbers or Signal Messenger group ids).

Sending messages to Signal to trigger events

You can use Signal Messenger REST API as a Home Assistant trigger. In this example, we will make a simple chatbot. If you write anything to your Signal account linked to Signal Messenger REST API, the automation gets triggered, with the condition that the number (attribute source) is correct, to take action by sending a Signal notification back with a “Message received!”.

To accomplish this, edit the configuration of Home Assistant, adding a RESTful resource as follows:

- resource: "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/receive/<number>"
  headers:
    Content-Type: application/json
  sensor:
    - name: "Signal message received"
      value_template: "" #this will fetch the message
      json_attributes_path: $[0].envelope
      json_attributes:
        - source #using attributes you can get additional information, in this case, the phone number.

You can create an automation as follows:

...
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.signal_message_received
    attribute: source
    to: "<yournumber>"
action:
  - service: notify.signal
    data:
      message: "Message received!"

Examples

A few examples on how to use this integration as actions in automations.

Text message

...
action:
  service: notify.NOTIFIER_NAME
  data:
    message: "That's an example that sends a simple text message to the recipients specified in the configuration.yaml"

Text message with an attachment

...
action:
  service: notify.NOTIFIER_NAME
  data:
    message: "Alarm in the living room!"
    data:
      attachments:
        - "/tmp/surveillance_camera.jpg"

Text message with an attachment from a URL

To attach files from outside of Home Assistant, the URLs must be added to the allowlist_external_urls list.

Note there is a 50MB size limit for attachments retrieved via URLs. You can also set verify_ssl to false to ignore SSL errors (default true).

...
action:
  service: notify.NOTIFIER_NAME
  data:
    message: "Person detected on Front Camera!"
    data:
      verify_ssl: false
      urls:
        - "http://homeassistant.local/api/frigate/notifications/<event-id>/thumbnail.jpg"