14 ms·

Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

180 points by balloob 5y ago

sen 5y ago
Very handy considering myself (and most people I know) have their HA+devices setup with as local-only. I don’t want my home automation connected to the internet at all, but I still want notifications if my kids room temps dropped too low or my garage door opens in the middle of the night.
- greyivy 5y ago
  I've been using the signal-cli add-on for this with a lot of success. I can add attachments, have the notifications show up on all my devices, and share a group with my partner so we both get the same notifications. All end-to-end encrypted.
  - idatum 5y ago
    I also use signal-cli for notifications including my own custom integrations using MQTT. And to connect remotely to the Home Assistant (HA) UI I use an SSH tunnel. But this is how I enjoy using HA, integrating with my own projects. What I also learned to enjoy about HA is the diversity of the community of users that found success in home automation without completely relying on "cloud" solutions. I think this is the ethos of this project: local control comes first.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Local only as in you can only use it and get notified when connected to your LAN?
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    Yes. Local push would mean you’d only get notified when at home. Home Assistant has had non-local push for a while now. I use that for door unlock and alarm notifications because I want them when I’m away. It’ll be handy to move less urgent ones to local only though.
- gruez 5y ago
  What type of smart theromstat allow local only operation? The popular ones I've looked at (nest, ecobee, honeywell) all look like they require internet connection to work.
  - afavour 5y ago
    I have an ecobee and I actually wonder whether it needs an internet connection. For setup, certainly. But I have it connected to Apple HomeKit, which all runs on internal networking. My Apple TV then exposes HomeKit for use outside the house. Either way, HA lets you use a whole load of random ZWave/ZigBee/whatever thermostats: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/latest-and-greatest-thermostats-no-cloud-preferable-we-all-saw-what-happened-with-nest/115827 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/latest-and-greatest-th...
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    Any Z-Wave one will operate locally. I just set one up the other day in Home Assistant.
  - gpanders 5y ago
    Ecobee works with HomeKit, which works without an internet connection. You don’t need an Apple device either, as HA has a HomeKit bridge.
  - Negitivefrags 5y ago
    https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#climate https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#climate Look at this list and go into each page to see the “IoT class”. “Local push” is the best but “Local polling” would satisfy your requirements as well.
  - hanklazard 5y ago
    The Venstars have been good to me and have a local api that integrates with HA. They are more basic in appearance, but that’s never bothered me.
  - mason55 5y ago
    I have the Honeywell T6 Pro Z-wave. Works great but any Z-wave will be fine.
- ingenium 5y ago
  You can add some protection by putting it behind a reverse proxy like HAProxy or nginx. It's mostly security through obscurity, but in this case it helps a lot unless you're being specifically targeted by someone. Basically pick a subdomain on a domain you own and have that and only that forward to HA. So the only way to connect to the HA instance from the internet is to know the exact subdomain you've picked for it. Set the proxy to not pass any port 443 traffic unless the subdomain matches one that you've set.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 5y ago
What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?
- BrittonR 5y ago
  I think the majority of people use a Raspberry Pi. Personally I use Pi4 with a SSD running Ubuntu. I run Home Assistant using Docker.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- setum 5y ago
  I had it running on raspberry pi 3 earlier, but I have now moved it to kubernetes (k3s) running from my NAS (x64).
- chomp 5y ago
  I have mine on one of these: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4q-special-price/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4q-special-price/ I snagged a zwave dongle to run my lights and it works great. People run it on everything from Raspberry Pis to Intel NUCs depending on what you wanna do. Some integrations need node, most python, and having a bunch of scheduled scripts firing at once can make the UI a tad slow. If you have a bunch of IoT stuff, I’d probably not throw it on a tiny pi zero for instance. You can follow these instructions if you’re using an odroid: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/odroid https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/odroid
- Gatsky 5y ago
  I use the cheapest intel NUC I could find, with an old SSD and an Aeotec Z-wave USB stick.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Two somewhat inexpensive NUC substitutes I've used: a) Asus Chromebox CN60. Under $50 used. You have to open it up to put it in dev mode, then go to https://mrchromebox.tech/ https://mrchromebox.tech/ to get a BIOS that can boot Linux. Uses removable DIMMS and M.2 SATA so it's easy to upgrade if needed. Includes WiFi. b) Older Lenovo Tiny models, like the M72, M83, M93P, etc. A little larger than the NUC form factor, but not by much. You can find them under $100 with an i3 or i5, 8GB ram, and sometimes an HDD or very small SSD. Most of them also include WiFi.
afavour 5y ago
This is very cool. I'm still hoping one day Home Assistant will add support for Google Home's Local API to avoid going over the internet to perform internal operations from a Home: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/google-home-local-home-sdk-released/125954/14 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/google-home-local-home...
- balloob 5y ago
  It’s implemented but it still requires an official Google Assistant smart home skill and a cloud connection to set-up. It works out of the box with Home Assistant Cloud. It’s kinda cool how it works, as your Google Home Mini will run our JS app and let it interact with Home Assistant. In the case of Home Assistant Cloud, all commands are just forwarded as-is as all processing is always local. You can see the source here https://github.com/NabuCasa/home-assistant-google-assistant-local-sdk https://github.com/NabuCasa/home-assistant-google-assistant-... Note, syncing local access, exposed devices and any command requiring 2FA still goes via the cloud.
candiddevmike 5y ago
Has Home Assistant settled on what you can configure via YAML and what needs to be done via the web UI yet? I left the ecosystem last year after the split became too hard to mentally keep track of.
- altano 5y ago
  nope
- balloob 5y ago
  It’s all clearly defined in ADR-007 https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/adr/0007-integration-config-yaml-structure.md https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/a... The TL;DR: Authentication for devices and services are via the UI only (to deal with OAuth2, refresh tokens, auto-updating IPs via mDNS). Automations/scripts/scenes are both YAML or UI.
- johntash 5y ago
  What did you switch to, if anything? I eventually just stopped updating altogether due to the constant breaking changes, but haven't settled on anything else yet.
  - snapetom 5y ago
    I bought a Hubitat earlier this year. It just works. GUI's a bit dated, and you kind of have to get used to the philosophy. However, once you get the hang of it, it's reliable, easy, and flexible enough for my needs.
  - Kstile 5y ago
    Not OP, but in the same boat. One by one my integration’s have been failing over the last 4 years. I have no idea how my alexa integration worked originally, less idea now. My kids enjoyed “alexa, TV off” while it lasted. Started by moving all of my automations to node-red. Most of my z-wave devices I’m interacting with directly over MQTT. After the bumpy switch to z-wavejs everything has been stable.
- 5y ago
trashcan 5y ago
Will this work if I only have the external URL pointed at Nabu Casa? I tried adding my internal/private URL on iOS and it kept timing out connecting, even after adding my SSID.
IgorPartola 5y ago
HA is great and their support Discord is the easiest way I’ve had getting tech support for any software product ever. I wish they had a better system for packaging it than their current system (either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on). But once you get it up and running it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it well.
- fy20 5y ago
  > either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on What would you suggest? For their target audience (people who are tech savvy, but don't necessarily know anything about Linux or programming) this seems like the ideal way to distribute it. Their website also has virtual machine images in various formats, and instructions to manually install it. https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-home-assistant-core https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-hom...
  - jhugo 5y ago
    I also wish there was an option for people wanting to have a bit more control or fit it more tidily into an existing home stack. I hacked my own container image so that I could run it in my home k8s, but it wasn't easy — there are lots of undocumented dependencies, and there's no clear separation of state and config. It has by far the untidiest architecture of all the software I run on my home servers. Once it's up and running, though, HA is an amazing bit of software.
    - eptcyka 5y ago
      I run it the forbidden way, via NixOS, and I do have to run the cycle of adding an integration, checking logs and then declaring which dependencies it needs and trying again. But once it works, it just works.
    - onedr0p 5y ago
      What did you need to do to the Docker image to make it run in k8s? I'm using the stock image on k8s just fine.
avipars 5y ago
This is great because it will help avoid the rate-limiting issue (and probably save HASS a good amount of money).
- robbiet480 5y ago
  The cloud push infrastructure doesn’t cost us that much actually, only around $30/month for both Android and iOS. We rate limit mostly to stop users from spamming themselves too much.
robbiet480 5y ago
I believe this is the first iOS app that (publicly at least) supports the new iOS local push framework which requires a special entitlement from Apple.
e_proxus 5y ago
Tangentially related: I frequently start long-running shell commands and go make a coffee. Is there an easy way to send a notification from my Mac to my iPhone? You would think it would be a use case for Automator or Shortcuts but I don’t think it’s possible? There are various apps that can do this but everyone I’ve found is very enterprise oriented and fairly expensive. I just want to send local network notifications to my phone once in a blue moon… (bonus if it would work while I’m talking a walk outside the range of my network too, but it’s not that important).
- ramraj07 5y ago
  The easiest might be via slack. Dead simple to write some python with their library, and you can set up a free account for yourself.
  - sgt 5y ago
    He probably wants a notification. I have my Slack notifications off, so I am not constantly interrupted when not in front of a computer. I do however leave things like iMessage and HomeKit to ping me.
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      Well, you can create your own slack domain, but yeah I don’t remember if you can configure notifications for each account separately.
- tams 5y ago
  I use Pushover [1] for this use case. Since it's a stateless HTTP request, Shortcuts can also use it natively. Is not enterprisey, the personal version is a one-time purchase. [1] https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/
  - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
    I second Pushover. During first wave of the pandemic the leading online grocery company in my country started slot system which opened at random times and people had to spend sleepless nights trying to see if the slot opens. I wrote a script to automate[1] this and used Pushover for notification. It was used my many and so I guess they might have gained several new customers. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/bigbasket-slot-alert/ https://abishekmuthian.com/bigbasket-slot-alert/

180 points by balloob 5y ago

sen 5y ago

Very handy considering myself (and most people I know) have their HA+devices setup with as local-only. I don’t want my home automation connected to the internet at all, but I still want notifications if my kids room temps dropped too low or my garage door opens in the middle of the night.

greyivy 5y ago
I've been using the signal-cli add-on for this with a lot of success. I can add attachments, have the notifications show up on all my devices, and share a group with my partner so we both get the same notifications. All end-to-end encrypted.
- idatum 5y ago
  I also use signal-cli for notifications including my own custom integrations using MQTT. And to connect remotely to the Home Assistant (HA) UI I use an SSH tunnel. But this is how I enjoy using HA, integrating with my own projects. What I also learned to enjoy about HA is the diversity of the community of users that found success in home automation without completely relying on "cloud" solutions. I think this is the ethos of this project: local control comes first.
barbazoo 5y ago
Local only as in you can only use it and get notified when connected to your LAN?
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  Yes. Local push would mean you’d only get notified when at home. Home Assistant has had non-local push for a while now. I use that for door unlock and alarm notifications because I want them when I’m away. It’ll be handy to move less urgent ones to local only though.
gruez 5y ago
What type of smart theromstat allow local only operation? The popular ones I've looked at (nest, ecobee, honeywell) all look like they require internet connection to work.
- afavour 5y ago
  I have an ecobee and I actually wonder whether it needs an internet connection. For setup, certainly. But I have it connected to Apple HomeKit, which all runs on internal networking. My Apple TV then exposes HomeKit for use outside the house. Either way, HA lets you use a whole load of random ZWave/ZigBee/whatever thermostats: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/latest-and-greatest-thermostats-no-cloud-preferable-we-all-saw-what-happened-with-nest/115827 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/latest-and-greatest-th...
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  Any Z-Wave one will operate locally. I just set one up the other day in Home Assistant.
- gpanders 5y ago
  Ecobee works with HomeKit, which works without an internet connection. You don’t need an Apple device either, as HA has a HomeKit bridge.
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#climate https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#climate Look at this list and go into each page to see the “IoT class”. “Local push” is the best but “Local polling” would satisfy your requirements as well.
- hanklazard 5y ago
  The Venstars have been good to me and have a local api that integrates with HA. They are more basic in appearance, but that’s never bothered me.
- mason55 5y ago
  I have the Honeywell T6 Pro Z-wave. Works great but any Z-wave will be fine.
ingenium 5y ago
You can add some protection by putting it behind a reverse proxy like HAProxy or nginx. It's mostly security through obscurity, but in this case it helps a lot unless you're being specifically targeted by someone. Basically pick a subdomain on a domain you own and have that and only that forward to HA. So the only way to connect to the HA instance from the internet is to know the exact subdomain you've picked for it. Set the proxy to not pass any port 443 traffic unless the subdomain matches one that you've set.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

threatofrain 5y ago

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

BrittonR 5y ago
I think the majority of people use a Raspberry Pi. Personally I use Pi4 with a SSD running Ubuntu. I run Home Assistant using Docker.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
setum 5y ago
I had it running on raspberry pi 3 earlier, but I have now moved it to kubernetes (k3s) running from my NAS (x64).
chomp 5y ago
I have mine on one of these: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4q-special-price/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-xu4q-special-price/ I snagged a zwave dongle to run my lights and it works great. People run it on everything from Raspberry Pis to Intel NUCs depending on what you wanna do. Some integrations need node, most python, and having a bunch of scheduled scripts firing at once can make the UI a tad slow. If you have a bunch of IoT stuff, I’d probably not throw it on a tiny pi zero for instance. You can follow these instructions if you’re using an odroid: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/odroid https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/odroid
Gatsky 5y ago
I use the cheapest intel NUC I could find, with an old SSD and an Aeotec Z-wave USB stick.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Two somewhat inexpensive NUC substitutes I've used: a) Asus Chromebox CN60. Under $50 used. You have to open it up to put it in dev mode, then go to https://mrchromebox.tech/ https://mrchromebox.tech/ to get a BIOS that can boot Linux. Uses removable DIMMS and M.2 SATA so it's easy to upgrade if needed. Includes WiFi. b) Older Lenovo Tiny models, like the M72, M83, M93P, etc. A little larger than the NUC form factor, but not by much. You can find them under $100 with an i3 or i5, 8GB ram, and sometimes an HDD or very small SSD. Most of them also include WiFi.

afavour 5y ago

This is very cool. I'm still hoping one day Home Assistant will add support for Google Home's Local API to avoid going over the internet to perform internal operations from a Home: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/google-home-local-home-sdk-released/125954/14 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/google-home-local-home...

balloob 5y ago
It’s implemented but it still requires an official Google Assistant smart home skill and a cloud connection to set-up. It works out of the box with Home Assistant Cloud. It’s kinda cool how it works, as your Google Home Mini will run our JS app and let it interact with Home Assistant. In the case of Home Assistant Cloud, all commands are just forwarded as-is as all processing is always local. You can see the source here https://github.com/NabuCasa/home-assistant-google-assistant-local-sdk https://github.com/NabuCasa/home-assistant-google-assistant-... Note, syncing local access, exposed devices and any command requiring 2FA still goes via the cloud.

candiddevmike 5y ago

Has Home Assistant settled on what you can configure via YAML and what needs to be done via the web UI yet? I left the ecosystem last year after the split became too hard to mentally keep track of.

altano 5y ago
nope
balloob 5y ago
It’s all clearly defined in ADR-007 https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/adr/0007-integration-config-yaml-structure.md https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/a... The TL;DR: Authentication for devices and services are via the UI only (to deal with OAuth2, refresh tokens, auto-updating IPs via mDNS). Automations/scripts/scenes are both YAML or UI.
johntash 5y ago
What did you switch to, if anything? I eventually just stopped updating altogether due to the constant breaking changes, but haven't settled on anything else yet.
- snapetom 5y ago
  I bought a Hubitat earlier this year. It just works. GUI's a bit dated, and you kind of have to get used to the philosophy. However, once you get the hang of it, it's reliable, easy, and flexible enough for my needs.
- Kstile 5y ago
  Not OP, but in the same boat. One by one my integration’s have been failing over the last 4 years. I have no idea how my alexa integration worked originally, less idea now. My kids enjoyed “alexa, TV off” while it lasted. Started by moving all of my automations to node-red. Most of my z-wave devices I’m interacting with directly over MQTT. After the bumpy switch to z-wavejs everything has been stable.
5y ago

trashcan 5y ago

Will this work if I only have the external URL pointed at Nabu Casa? I tried adding my internal/private URL on iOS and it kept timing out connecting, even after adding my SSID.

IgorPartola 5y ago

HA is great and their support Discord is the easiest way I’ve had getting tech support for any software product ever. I wish they had a better system for packaging it than their current system (either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on). But once you get it up and running it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it well.

fy20 5y ago
> either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on What would you suggest? For their target audience (people who are tech savvy, but don't necessarily know anything about Linux or programming) this seems like the ideal way to distribute it. Their website also has virtual machine images in various formats, and instructions to manually install it. https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-home-assistant-core https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-hom...
- jhugo 5y ago
  I also wish there was an option for people wanting to have a bit more control or fit it more tidily into an existing home stack. I hacked my own container image so that I could run it in my home k8s, but it wasn't easy — there are lots of undocumented dependencies, and there's no clear separation of state and config. It has by far the untidiest architecture of all the software I run on my home servers. Once it's up and running, though, HA is an amazing bit of software.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    I run it the forbidden way, via NixOS, and I do have to run the cycle of adding an integration, checking logs and then declaring which dependencies it needs and trying again. But once it works, it just works.
  - onedr0p 5y ago
    What did you need to do to the Docker image to make it run in k8s? I'm using the stock image on k8s just fine.

avipars 5y ago

This is great because it will help avoid the rate-limiting issue (and probably save HASS a good amount of money).

robbiet480 5y ago
The cloud push infrastructure doesn’t cost us that much actually, only around $30/month for both Android and iOS. We rate limit mostly to stop users from spamming themselves too much.

robbiet480 5y ago

I believe this is the first iOS app that (publicly at least) supports the new iOS local push framework which requires a special entitlement from Apple.

e_proxus 5y ago

Tangentially related: I frequently start long-running shell commands and go make a coffee. Is there an easy way to send a notification from my Mac to my iPhone? You would think it would be a use case for Automator or Shortcuts but I don’t think it’s possible? There are various apps that can do this but everyone I’ve found is very enterprise oriented and fairly expensive. I just want to send local network notifications to my phone once in a blue moon… (bonus if it would work while I’m talking a walk outside the range of my network too, but it’s not that important).

ramraj07 5y ago
The easiest might be via slack. Dead simple to write some python with their library, and you can set up a free account for yourself.
- sgt 5y ago
  He probably wants a notification. I have my Slack notifications off, so I am not constantly interrupted when not in front of a computer. I do however leave things like iMessage and HomeKit to ping me.
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Well, you can create your own slack domain, but yeah I don’t remember if you can configure notifications for each account separately.
tams 5y ago
I use Pushover [1] for this use case. Since it's a stateless HTTP request, Shortcuts can also use it natively. Is not enterprisey, the personal version is a one-time purchase. [1] https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  I second Pushover. During first wave of the pandemic the leading online grocery company in my country started slot system which opened at random times and people had to spend sleepless nights trying to see if the slot opens. I wrote a script to automate[1] this and used Pushover for notification. It was used my many and so I guess they might have gained several new customers. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/bigbasket-slot-alert/ https://abishekmuthian.com/bigbasket-slot-alert/