Home Assistant Themes and Plugins with HACS

I’m about to show you one HACS to customise your Home Assistant with plugins and themes. HACS stands for Home Assistant Community Store.

When you add it to your Home Assistant you will be able to install and remove themes and plugins with a click of a button.

Most of the time I like the stock look of a product, because everything will work as designed and usually I have no problems with the updates and performance.

Customisation

Themes and customisations as a whole become very popular these days. So, I started to search for a solution and I found HACS and even more I like it.

I like it so much that I even decided to show it to you and to demonstrate you how you can install it and how to customise Home Assistant with themes and plugins.

Requirements:

To install HACS you will need:

• Working Home Assistant version 0.98.0 or higher (if you don’t have such check this video of mine)
• A GitHub account
• And of course smashed subscribe button on my newsletter

Quick Warning

Everything you find in HACS that includes HACS itself is not tested by Home Assistant team. If your Smart Home depends on your Home Assistant it’s recommended to test these plugins and themes on a separate test Home Assistant installation first.

With that being said lets customise our Home Assistant now with HACS:

Installation of HACS

• Download the latest HACS release file (hacs.zip) from – here
• Extract its contents into custom_components/hacs folder inside your Home Assistant configuration folder (folder where your configuration.yaml is)
• you have to have the following structure at the end:
  <HA config_dir>/custom_components/hacs
• To enable Themes section in HACS – add the following lines to your configuration.yaml (if you already have these lines already, don’t add them twice)

frontend:    
  themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes  

Restart Home Assistant

• Restart Home Assistant after that
• Go to GitHub and create an account if you don’t have such. Then go to – https://github.com/settings/tokens
• Generate new Personal Access Token and copy your token
• Go to Home Assistant > Configuration > Integrations and click on the “+” button
• Search for HACS (if you don’t find it clear your browser cache, check that you follow the exact steps above, and check Home Assistant logs for errors)
• Paste your Personal Access Token from GitHub in the HACS dialog window
• Click the “submit” button and you should have HACS installed

Installation of Themes and Plugins

URL of the plugin: https://github.com/bramkragten/weather-card

• Search for weather-card in Plugins section of HACS and hit install
• Add the following to your lovelace-ui.yaml or using the Raw config editor:

 type: custom:weather-card 
 entity: weather.PUT_YOUR_WEATHER_ENTITY_HERE
 name: Home 

URL of the theme: https://github.com/basnijholt/lovelace-ios-dark-mode-theme

• Search for iOS Dark Mode Theme in Themes section of HACS and hit install
• Add the following line to your lovelace-ui.yaml or use the Raw config editor:

background: var(--background-image)

• To put different background follow the steps here
• (optional) add the following to the same file to make the header smaller (you need to install custom-header from here https://github.com/maykar/custom-header as well)

 custom_header: 
   background: 'rgba(155, 155, 155, 0.25)' 
   swipe_animate: fade 
   swipe_prevent_default: true 
   compact_mode: true 
   button_text: 
      options: '{{ hours24 }}:{{ minutesLZ }}' 

URL of the theme: https://github.com/bbbenji/synthwave-hass

• Search for synthwave-hass in Themes section of HACS and hit install

AppDaemon apps

Apart from Themes you can use Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) to install plugins, scripts and AppDaemon apps. If you want to learn more about AppDaemon apps – https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Question?

My question for you is do you like dark modes – say yes or no in the comments section bellow and I will know for what you are talking about.

I’m glad that this is not the case with the Home Assistant, but I’ve seen products with their greatest feature and pride is that they have a dark mode.

Support my Work

Any sort of engagement on this site and YouTube channel does really help out a lot with the Google and YouTube algorithm, so make sure you leave comments, hit the subscribe, Like and Bell buttons If you enjoy this post.

I really hope that you find this information useful and you now have HACS with a lot of themes and plug-ins in your Home Assistant.

Thank you for watching and reading, stay safe and see you next time.

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