Set up Development Environment

You’ll need to set up a development environment if you want to develop a new feature or component for Home Assistant. Read on to learn how to set up.

Preparing your environment

Developing on Linux

Install the core dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev python3-venv

In order to run script/setup below you will need some more dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg-dev libffi-dev libudev-dev zlib1g-dev

Different distributions have different package installation mechanisms and sometimes packages names as well. For example Centos would use: sudo yum install epel-release && sudo yum install python34 python34-devel mysql-devel

Additional dependencies exist if you plan to perform Frontend Development, please read the Frontend section to learn more.

Developing on Windows

If you are using Windows as a development platform, make sure that you have the correct Microsoft Visual C++ build tools installed. The installation of the most requirements and validation using tox will fail if this is not done correctly. Check the Windows Compilers section on the Python website for details.

Due to Home Assistant is mainly designed and developed on Linux distributions it is not recommended to develop on Windows machines. However on Windows 10 machines you should decide to set up a Linux subsystem.

Setup Linux subsystem.

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get upgrade
$ echo 'export DISPLAY=:0' >> ~/.bashrc && . ~/.bashrc
$ sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop -y

It is recommended using PyCharm as debugger. Download and start PyCharm.

$ wget https://download.jetbrains.com/python/pycharm-community-20XX.X.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf pycharm-community-20XX.X
$ ./pycharm.sh

In order to display the PyCharm GUI on Windows you need to run a X-Server like VcXserv.

Also, make sure to install or upgrade the setuptools Python package. It contains compatibility improvements and adds automatic use of compilers:

$ pip install --upgrade setuptools

Developing on OS X

Install Homebrew, then use that to install Python 3:

$ brew install python3

Setup Local Repository

Visit the Home Assistant repository and click Fork. Once forked, setup your local copy of the source using the commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/home-assistant.git
$ cd home-assistant
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.git

Setting up virtual environment

To isolate your environment from the rest of the system, set up a venv. Within the home-assistant directory, create and activate your virtual environment.

$ python3 -m venv .
$ source bin/activate

Install the requirements with a provided script named setup.

$ script/setup

Invoke your installation.

$ hass

Logging

By default logging in home-assistant is tuned for operating in production (set to INFO by default, with some modules set to even less verbose logging levels).

You can use the logger component to adjust logging to DEBUG to see even more details about what is going on.