Add Home Assistant Notification Support

[ivelin]

💡 The Idea

Home Assistant is a popular smart home system. It's a top 10 github project for 2020.

It allows notifications from IoT devices to a local home hub via REST API or MQTT and sends them to the end user on the Home Assistant mobile app. This allows IoT devices to only communicate locally on the home network without reaching out to cloud services, which is a big privacy topic for smart home devices.

When apprise is used in IoT applications such as ambianic-edge, it is desirable to minimize dependency on cloud services.

[caronc]

I use Home Assistant myself for my own home. I love it. But I never quite understood how external notifications would work with it.
I've integrated Apprise already the other way (it's part of HA) and you can send notifications outbound from it.

How would you expect the notifications to work?

[ivelin]

Thank you for looking into this. I imagine users of the Home Assistant mobile app to receive a custom notification message sent from an IoT device that runs apprise as its notifications provider. The IoT device does not need to have internet connection if it can make a local network call to the home assistant hub. Currently in order for an IoT device to integrate into Home Assistant, it can use the REST API, MQTT, Zigbee, ZWave or a custom Home Assistant component. MQTT is probably the easiest, but Home Assistant does not have MQTT enabled by default. It's an extra step for the user to enable it. Zigbree and ZWave require specialized hardware components. Writing a Home Assistant component requires writing a custom python app that has to be accepted in the next Home Assistant build. Theoretically it can be installed through its marketplace, but I don't see that happening much. The simplest way seems to be the HA REST API. If apprise is the notifications library for the IoT device, integrating with HA would be just another configuration setting. Somewhat similar to connecting to a local SMTP server, which ultimately delivers the message to the end user's email client. Hope that helps!

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On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:38 PM Chris Caron ***@***.***> wrote: I use Home Assistant myself for my own home. I love it. But I never quite understood how external notifications would work with it. I've integrated Apprise already the other way (it's part of HA) and you can send notifications outbound from it. How would you expect the notifications to work? — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#350 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AARBUFJWLZ4ITQRVBCLBVK3S5H3ARANCNFSM4W5VRN4Q> .

[caronc]

Done! 👍 🙂 It seems to work in my environment really well, but maybe you wouldn't mind checking out the branch and giving it a go for yourself?

I directly integrated with HA through their REST interface. I do like the idea of adding a mqtt:// URL down the road though!

EDIT: Follow the link to the Pull Request above to see the syntax

[ivelin]

Wow, you are fast!! Let me test and report back.

[ivelin]

@caronc In case you want to track progress of the Ambianic Edge integration with HA through the new apprise feature.
ambianic/ambianic-ui#515

[caronc]

I've gone ahead and merged the branch as it's still working great for me. With 100% code coverage, I'm confident others will be able to leverage it without issue. 👍

Thanks again for the great suggestion!

[ivelin]

Fantastic! Thanks, again @caronc for the great addition! Sorry we are not matching your lightning speed, but we will get there.

[ivelin]

I will keep an eye for the official release announcement with this feature so we can make noise on our channels.

[ivelin]

Linking to your PR that closes this issue. For some reason, I don't see it in the issue timeline above:
#354

UPDATE: Never mind. I just saw it tucked in the timeline between comments.