Home Assistant is built on top of the Polymer webcomponents framework. Polymer allows building encapsulated custom HTML elements. Home-Assistant-Polymer source code on GitHub.

Do not use development mode in production. Home Assistant uses aggressive caching to improve the mobile experience. This is disabled during development so that you do not have to restart the server in between changes.

Setting up the environment

All commands below need to be run from inside the home-assistant-polymer repository.

Home Assistant will by default serve the compiled version of the frontend from the hass_frontend Python package. For development you want to work with the unbundled source files which are in the home-assistant-polymer repository.

First step is to configure Home Assistant to use the development mode for the frontend. Do this by updating the frontend config in your configuration.yaml and set the path to the polymer repo:

frontend:
  development_repo: <absolute path to home-assistant-polymer>

Next step is to git clone the home-assistant-polymer repository. You can place the repository anywhere on your system but to keep these instructions simple we’re cloning the home-assistant-polymer repository as a sibling to the Home Assistant repo.

$ git clone https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer.git
$ cd home-assistant-polymer

After cloning, your folder structure should look like this:

/home-assistant
/home-assistant-polymer

Node.js is required to build the frontend. The preferred method of installing node.js is with nvm. Install nvm using the instructions in the README, and install the correct node.js by running the following command:

$ nvm install

Yarn is used as the package manager for node modules. Install yarn using the instructions here.

Next, development dependencies need to be installed to bootstrap the frontend development environment. First activate the right Node version and then download all the needed modules and do a first build:

$ nvm use
$ script/bootstrap

This script will use yarn and bower to install all the necessary dependencies necessary for development and do an initial build.

Creating pull requests

If you’re planning on issuing a PR back to the Home Assistant codebase you need to fork the polymer project and add your fork as a remote to the Home Assistant Polymer repo.

$ git remote add <remote name> <github URL to your fork>

When you’ve made your changes and are ready to push them change to the working directory for the polymer project and then push your changes

$ git add -A
$ git commit -m "Added new feature X"
$ git push -u <remote name> HEAD

Development

If you are changing html files under /src or /panels - just reload the page in your browser to see changes. If you are changing javascript files under /js you need to have gulp running to watch the source files for changes and build when necessary.

$ yarn run dev-watch

The source code for the frontend can be found in different directories:

• UI: /home-assistant-polymer/src/
• Panels: /home-assistant-polymer/panels/
• Javascript code: /home-assistant-polymer/js/

Building the Polymer frontend

Building a new version of the frontend is as simple as running script/build_frontend. To use a built version package it: python setup.py sdist Install it: pip3 install dist/home-assistant-frontend-xxxxxxxx.0.tar.gz --upgrade Run Home Assistant without trying to reinstall production package: hass --skip-pip