Home Assistant

Calendar

The calendar integration provides calendar entities, allowing other integrations to integrate calendars into Home Assistant. Calendars are shown on the calendar dashboard and can be used with automations.

This page does not provide instructions on how to create calendar entities. Please see the “Calendar” category on the integrations page to find integration offering calendar entities.

Building block integration

The calendar integration cannot be directly used. You cannot create your own calendar entities using this integration. This integration is a building block for other integrations to use, enabling them to create calendar entities for you.

A calendar entity has a state and attributes representing the next event (only). A calendar trigger is much more flexible, has fewer limitations, and is recommended for automations instead of using the entity state.

Viewing and managing calendars

Each calendar is represented as its own entity in Home Assistant and can be viewed and managed on a calendar dashboard. You can find the calendar dashboard in the main sidebar of your Home Assistant instance.

Some calendar integrations allow Home Assistant to manage your calendars directly from Home Assistant. In this case, you can add new events by clicking the “Add event” button in the lower right corner of the calendar dashboard.

Also see Services below.

Automation

Calendar Triggers enable automation based on an event’s start or end. Review the Automating Home Assistant getting started guide on automations or the Automation documentation for full details.

Screenshot Trigger

An example of a calendar trigger in YAML:

automation:
  - trigger:
    - platform: calendar
      # Possible values: start, end
      event: start
      # The calendar entity_id
      entity_id: calendar.personal
      # Optional time offset to fire a set time before or after event start/end
      offset: -00:15:00

Calendar triggers should not generally use automation mode single to ensure the trigger can fire when multiple events start at the same time (e.g., use queued or parallel instead). Note that calendars are read once every 15 minutes. When testing, make sure you do not plan events less than 15 minutes away from the current time, or your trigger might not fire.

See Automation Trigger Variables: Calendar for additional trigger data available for conditions or actions.

Automation Recipes

Below are a few example ways you can use Calendar triggers.

Services

Some calendar integrations allow Home Assistant to manage your calendars directly using services. The services provided by some calendar entities are described below or you can read more about Service Calls.

Service calendar.create_event

Add a new calendar event. A calendar target is selected with a Target Selector and the data payload supports the following fields:

Service data attribute Optional Description Example
summary no Acts as the title of the event. Bowling
description yes The description of the event. Birthday bowling
start_date_time yes The date and time the event should start. 2019-03-10 20:00:00
end_date_time yes The date and time the event should end (exclusive). 2019-03-10 23:00:00
start_date yes The date the whole day event should start. 2019-03-10
end_date yes The date the whole day event should end (exclusive). 2019-03-11
in yes Days or weeks that you want to create the event in. “days”: 2
location yes The location of the event. Bowling center

You either use start_date_time and end_date_time, or start_date and end_date, or in.

This is a full example of service call in YAML:

service: calendar.create_event
target:
  entity_id: calendar.device_automation_schedules
data:
  summary: "Example"
  start_date: "2022-10-01"
  end_date: "2022-10-02"

Home Assistant Calendars do not allow zero duration Calendar events. The following would create a one minute long event starting “now”. This could be used to record an external event in a Calendar.

service: calendar.create_event
target:
  entity_id: calendar.device_automation_schedules
data:
  summary: "Example"
  start_date_time: "{{ now() }}"
  end_date_time: "{{ now() + timedelta(minutes=1) }}"

Service calendar.list_events

This service populates Response Data with calendar events within a date range.

Service data attribute Optional Description Example
start_date_time yes Return active events after this time (exclusive). When not set, defaults to now. 2019-03-10 20:00:00
end_date_time yes Return active events before this time (exclusive). Cannot be used with ‘duration’. 2019-03-10 23:00:00
duration yes Return active events from start_date_time until the specified duration. days: 2

Use only one of end_date_time or duration.

service: calendar.list_events
target:
  entity_id: calendar.school
data:
  duration:
    hours: 24
response_variable: agenda

The response data field events is a list of events with these fields:

Response data Description Example
summary The title of the event. Bowling
description The description of the event. Birthday bowling
start The date or date time the event starts. 2019-03-10 20:00:00
end The date or date time the event ends (exclusive). 2019-03-10 23:00:00
location The location of the event. Bowling center

This example uses a template with response data in another service call:

service: notify.gmail_com
data:
  target: [email protected]
  title: Daily agenda for {{ now().date() }}
  message: >-
    Your agenda for today:
    <p>
    {% for event in agenda.events %}
    {{ event.start}}: {{ event.summary }}<br>
    {% endfor %}
    </p>