Home Assistant

Google Calendar Event

This platform allows you to connect to your Google Calendars and generate binary sensors. The sensors created can trigger based on any event on the calendar or only for matching events. When you first setup this component it will generate a new configuration file google_calendars.yaml that will contain information about all of the calendars you can see.

Prerequisites

Generate a Client ID and Client Secret on Google Developers Console.

  1. Follow the wizard using the following information.
  2. When it gets to the point of asking Which API are you using? just click cancel.
  3. Under APIs & Services > Credentials, click on the tab ‘OAuth consent screen’.
  4. Set ‘Product name shown to users’ to anything you want. We suggest Home-Assistant.
  5. Save this page. You don’t have to fill out anything else there.
  6. Click ‘Create credentials’ -> OAuth client ID.
  7. Set the Application type to ‘Other’ and give this credential set a name then click Create.
  8. Save the client ID and secret as you will need to put these in your configuration.yaml file.
  9. Click on “Library”, search for “Google Calendar API” and enable it.

Basic Setup

To integrate Google Calendar in Home Assistant, add the following section to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
google:
  client_id: *Value_created_from_steps_above*
  client_secret: *Value_created_from_steps_above*

Configuration variables:

  • client_id (Required): Use the value you generated in the Prerequisites stage.
  • client_secret (Required): Use the value you generated in the Prerequisites stage.
  • track_new_calendar (Optional): Will automatically generate a binary sensor when a new calendar is detected. The system scans for new calendars on startup. By default this is set to True.

The next steps will require you to have Home Assistant running.

After you have it running complete the Google authentication that pops up. It will give you a URL and a code to enter. This will grant your Home Assistant service access to all the Google Calendars that the account you authenticate with can read. This is a Read-Only view of these calendars.

Calendar Configuration

Editing google_calendars.yaml

A basic entry for a single calendar looks like:

- cal_id: "***************************@group.calendar.google.com"
  entities:
  - device_id: test_everything
    name: Give me everything
    track: true
- cal_id: "***************************@group.calendar.google.com"
  entities:
  - device_id: test_important
    name: Important Stuff
    track: true
    search: "#Important"
    offset: "!!"
  - device_id: test_unimportant
    name: UnImportant Stuff
    track: true
    search: "#UnImportant"

Variables:

  • cal_id: The Google generated unique id for this calendar. DO NOT CHANGE

  • entities: Yes, you can have multiple sensors for a calendar!

    • device_id: (Required): The name that all your automations/scripts will use to reference this device.

    • name: (Required): What is the name of your sensor that you’ll see in the frontend.

    • track: (Required): Should we create a sensor True or ignore it False?

    • search: (Optional): If set will only trigger for matched events.

    • offset: (Optional): A set of characters that precede a number in the event title for designating a pre-trigger state change on the sensor. (Default: !!)

From this we will end up with the binary sensors calendar.test_unimportant and calendar.test_important which will toggle themselves on/off based on events on the same calendar that match the search value set for each. You’ll also have a sensor calendar.test_everything that will not filter events out and always show the next event available.

But what if you only wanted it to toggle based on all events? Just leave out the search parameter.

Note: If you use a # sign for search then wrap the whole search term in quotes. Otherwise everything following the hash sign would be considered a YAML comment.

Sensor attributes

  • offset_reached: If set in the event title and parsed out will be on/off once the offset in the title in minutes is reached. So the title Very important meeting #Important !!-10 would trigger this attribute to be on 10 minutes before the event starts.

  • all_day: True/False if this is an all day event. Will be False if there is no event found.

  • message: The event title with the search and offset values extracted. So in the above example for offset_reached the message would be set to Very important meeting

  • description: The event description.

  • location: The event Location.

  • start_time: Start time of event.

  • end_time: End time of event.