Push Notifications

The html5 notification platform enables you to receive push notifications to Chrome or Firefox, no matter where you are in the world. html5 also supports Chrome and Firefox on Android, which enables native-app-like integrations without actually needing a native app.

HTML5 push notifications do not work on iOS.

To enable this platform, add the following lines to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
notify:
  - name: NOTIFIER_NAME
    platform: html5
    gcm_api_key: 'gcm-server-key'
    gcm_sender_id: 'gcm-sender-id'

Configuration variables:

• name (Optional): Setting the optional parameter name allows multiple notifiers to be created. The default value is notify. The notifier will bind to the service notify.NOTIFIER_NAME.
• gcm_api_key (Required if pushing to Chrome): The API Server key provided to you by Google for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Required to push to Chrome.
• gcm_sender_id (Required if pushing to Chrome): The sender ID provided to you by Google for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Required to push to Chrome.

Getting ready for Chrome

1. Make sure you can access your Home Assistant installation from outside your network over https (see docs).
2. Create a new project at https://console.cloud.google.com/home/dashboard.
3. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials/domainverification and verify your domain via Google Webmaster Central / Search Console - instructions.
4. With the domain verified, go to https://console.firebase.google.com, select import Google project, and select the project you created.
5. Then, click the cogwheel on top left and select “Project settings”.
6. Select ‘Cloud Messaging’ tab, listed beneath Project Credentials will be your 152 character ‘Server Key’ and 12 digit ID ‘Sender ID’ you need for configuring this component.

Verify your domain

Follow these steps to verify domain ownership with Google Webmaster Central / Search Console:

1. Enter your domain and add ‘/local’ at the end, ie. https://example.com:8123/local
2. Select HTML file verification and download the google*.html file.
3. Create a directory named “www” in your Home Assistant configuration directory (/config share from Samba add-on).
4. Place the downloaded google*.html file in the “www” directory.
5. RESTART Home Assistant - this is important!
6. Verify the file can be accessed in the browser, ie. https://example.com:8123/local/google123456789.html (change filename) - you should a plain text message saying “google-site-verification: …” - if you see “404: Not Found” or something else, retry the above steps.
7. Go back to Google Webmaster Central / Search Console and proceed with the verification.

Requirements

The html5 platform can only function if all of the following requirements are met:

• You are using Chrome and/or Firefox on any desktop platform, ChromeOS or Android.
• Your Home Assistant instance is exposed to the world.
• If using a proxy, HTTP basic authentication must be off for registering or unregistering for push notifications. It can be re-enabled afterwards.
• If you don’t run Hass.io: pywebpush must be installed. libffi-dev, libpython-dev, and libssl-dev must be installed prior to pywebpush (i.e. pywebpush probably won’t automatically install).
• You have configured SSL for your Home Assistant. It doesn’t need to be configured in Home Assistant though, i.e. you can be running NGINX in front of Home Assistant and this will still work. The certificate must be trustworthy (i.e. not self signed).
• You are willing to accept the notification permission in your browser.

Setting up

Assuming you have already added the platform to your configuration:

1. Open Home Assistant in Chrome or Firefox.
2. Assuming you have met all the requirements above, you should see a new slider for Push Notifications through the sidebar Configuration > General.
3. Slide it to the on position.
4. Within a few seconds you should be prompted to allow notifications from Home Assistant.
5. Assuming you accept, that’s all there is to it!
6. (Optional, but highly recommended!) Open the html5_push_registrations.conf file in your configuration directory. You will see a new entry for the browser you just added. Rename it from unnamed device to a name of your choice, which will make it easier to identify later. Do not change anything else in this file! You need to restart Home Assistant after making any changes to the file.

Usage

The html5 platform accepts a standard notify payload. However, there are also some special features built in which you can control in the payload.

Any JSON examples below can be converted to YAML for automations.

Actions

Chrome supports notification actions, which are configurable buttons that arrive with the notification and can cause actions on Home Assistant to happen when pressed. You can send up to 2 actions.

{
  "message": "Anne has arrived home",
  "data": {
    "actions": [
      {
        "action": "open",
        "icon": "/static/icons/favicon-192x192.png",
        "title": "Open Home Assistant"
      },
      {
        "action": "open_door",
        "title": "Open door"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Data

Any parameters that you pass in the notify payload that aren’t valid for use in the HTML5 notification (actions, badge, body, dir, icon, image, lang, renotify, requireInteraction, tag, timestamp, vibrate) will be sent back to you in the callback events.

{
  "title": "Front door",
  "message": "The front door is open",
  "data": {
    "my-custom-parameter": "front-door-open"
  }
}

Tag

By default, every notification sent has a randomly generated UUID (v4) set as its tag or unique identifier. The tag is unique to the notification, not to a specific target. If you pass your own tag in the notify payload you can replace the notification by sending another notification with the same tag. You can provide a tag like so:

{
  "title": "Front door",
  "message": "The front door is open",
  "data": {
    "tag": "front-door-notification"
  }
}

Example of adding a tag to your notification. This won’t create new notification if there already exists one with the same tag.

  - alias: Push/update notification of sensor state with tag
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: sensor.sensor
    action:
      service: notify.html5
      data_template:
        message: "Last known sensor state is {{ states('sensor.sensor') }}."
      data:
        data:
          tag: 'notification-about-sensor'

Targets

If you do not provide a target parameter in the notify payload a notification will be sent to all registered targets as listed in html5_push_registrations.conf. You can provide a target parameter like so:

{
  "title": "Front door",
  "message": "The front door is open",
  "target": "unnamed device"
}

target can also be a string array of targets like so:

{
  "title": "Front door",
  "message": "The front door is open",
  "target": ["unnamed device", "unnamed device 2"]
}

Overrides

You can pass any of the parameters listed here in the data dictionary. Please note, Chrome specifies that the maximum size for an icon is 320px by 320px, the maximum badge size is 96px by 96px and the maximum icon size for an action button is 128px by 128px.

URL

You can provide a URL to open when the notification is clicked by putting url in the data dictionary like so:

{
  "title": "Front door",
  "message": "The front door is open",
  "data": {
    "url": "https://google.com"
  }
}

If no URL or actions are provided, interacting with a notification will open your Home Assistant in the browser. You can use relative URLs to refer to Home Assistant, i.e. /map would turn into https://192.168.1.2:8123/map.

Automating notification events

During the lifespan of a single push notification, Home Assistant will emit a few different events to the event bus which you can use to write automations against.

Common event payload parameters are:

You can use the target parameter to write automations against a single target. For more granularity, use action and target together to write automations which will do specific things based on what target clicked an action.

received event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.received when the notification is received on the device.

- alias: HTML5 push notification received and displayed on device
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: html5_notification.received

clicked event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.clicked when the notification or a notification action button is clicked. The action button clicked is available as action in the event_data.

- alias: HTML5 push notification clicked
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: html5_notification.clicked

or

- alias: HTML5 push notification action button clicked
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: html5_notification.clicked
    event_data:
      action: open_door

closed event

You will receive an event named html5_notification.closed when the notification is closed.

- alias: HTML5 push notification clicked
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: html5_notification.closed

Making notifications work with NGINX proxy

If you use NGINX as a proxy with authentication in front of your Home Assistant instance, you may have trouble with receiving events back to Home Assistant. It’s because of authentication token that cannot be passed through the proxy.

To solve the issue put additional location into your nginx site’s configuration:

location /api/notify.html5/callback {
    if ($http_authorization = "") { return 403; }
    allow all;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8123;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_redirect http:// https://;
}

This rule check if request have Authorization HTTP header and bypass the htpasswd (if you use one).

If you still have the problem, even with mentioned rule, try to add this code:

    proxy_set_header Authorization $http_authorization;
    proxy_pass_header Authorization;