Glossary

The glossary covers terms which are used around Home Assistant.

• Action:

  Actions are events that fires once all triggers and conditions have been met.

• Automation:

  Automations offer the capability to call a service based on a simple or complex trigger. Automation allows a condition such as sunset to cause an event, such as a light turning on.

• Component:

  Components provide the core logic for the functionality in Home Assistant. Like notify provides sending notifications.

• Condition:

  Conditions are an optional part of an automation that will prevent an action from firing if they are not met.

• Cookbook:

  The Cookbook contains a set of configuration examples of Home Assistant from the community.

• Customize:

  Customization allows you to overwrite the default parameter of your devices in the configuration.

• Device:

  A device is usually a physical unit which can do or observe something.

• Discovery:

  Discovery is the automatic setup of zeroconf/mDNS and uPnP devices after they are discovered.

• Entity:

  An entity is the representation of a single device, unit or web service.

• Event:

  An event is when something happens.

• Frontend:

  The frontend is a necessary component for the UI, it is also where you can define your themes.

• Group:

  Groups are a way to organize your entities into a single unit.

• HADashboard:

  HADashboard is a modular, skinnable dashboard for Home Assistant that is intended to be wall mounted, and is optimized for distance viewing.

• Hass.io:

  Hass.io is an operating system that will take care of installing and updating Home Assistant, is managed from the Home Assistant UI, allows creating/restoring snapshots of your configuration, and can easily be extended.

• Hassbian:

  Hassbian is a customized operating system specifically tailored for Raspberry Pi users. It is one of the easiest way of installing and running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi.

• Packages:

  Packages allow you to bundle different component configurations together.

• Platform:

  Platforms make the connection to a specific software or hardware platform. For example, the pushbullet platform works with the service pushbullet.com to send notifications.

• Scene:

  Scenes capture the states you want certain entities to be. For example a scene can specify that light A should be turned on and light B should be bright red.

• Script:

  Scripts are components that allow users to specify a sequence of actions to be executed by Home Assistant when turned on.

• Service:

  Services are called to perform actions.

• Template:

  A template is an automation definition that can include variables for the service or data from the trigger values. This allows automations to generate dynamic actions.

• Trigger:

  A trigger is a set of values or conditions of a platform that are defined to cause an automation to run.

• Zone:

  Zones are areas that can be used for presence detection.

• hass:

  HASS or hass is often used as an abbreviation for Home Assistant. It is also the command line tool.