Automating Home Assistant
Once your devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities.
are set up, it’s time to put the cherry on the pie: automationAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more]. In this guide we’re going to create a simple automation rule to turn on the lights when the sun sets. Of course, this assumes that you have set up an integration that provides a light at this point.
In the user interface in the sidebar, click Settings > Automations & Scenes. You will now see the automation screen from which you can manage all the automations in Home Assistant.
Click the blue button at the bottom right to create a new automation. A dialog will appear. Choose Create new automation. You are presented with a blank automation screen.
The first thing we will do is set a name. Enter “Turn Lights On at Sunset”.
The second step is defining what should triggerA trigger is a set of values or conditions of a platform that are defined to cause an automation to run.
[Learn more] our automation to run. In this case, we want to use the event of the sun setting to trigger our automation. However, if we would turn on the lights when the sun actually sets, it would be too late as it already gets quite dark while it’s setting. So we’re going to add an offset.
In the trigger section, click on the dropdown menu and change the trigger type to Sun. It allows us to choose sunrise or sunset, so go ahead and pick Sunset. As we discussed, we want our automation to be triggered a little before the sun actually sets, so let’s add -00:30 as the offset. This indicates that the automation will be triggered 30 minutes before the sun actually sets. Neat!
Once we have defined our trigger, scroll down to the action section. Make sure the action type is set to Call service and change the service to light.turn_on. For this automation we’re going to turn on all lights, so let’s change the service data to:
entity_id: all
Click the orange button to save the automation. Now wait till it’s 30 minutes until the sun sets and see your automation magic!
Presence detection
If after completing this getting started you are interested in reading more about automations, we recommend the following pages:
Please note, these pages may require a bit more experience with Home Assistant than you probably have at this point of this tutorial.