Home Assistant Calendar with Google Calendar and Automations

The guys from Home Assistant released a new major version with a lot of new cool features like this beautiful Home Assistant calendar menu. To enable it you have to add a calendar integration to your home assistant and I will show you how you can easily do that with the google calendar.

What you will find in this article?

Adding a Home Assistant calendar just to sit there and doing nothing else than showing the date is not as fun as using it with automations triggered when there is a calendar event. 

Or exactly the opposite when something happens in your Home Assistant respectively your Smart Home you can automatically create an event in google calendar. 

You can use these functionalities to control or monitor your Home Assistant remotely without any router port forwards or VPNs, right from the comfort of your hand using your phone and google calendar.

And In this video I will try to show you how to setup everything so you will have a Google calendar in your Home Assistant Calendar with fun automations in no time.

Now I have to schedule an appointment for а wholesale smashing of the like button for the YouTube algorithm, just kidding now let’s go:

Get the Google Calendar credentials for the Home Assistant Calendar

Open the following URL where the Home Assistant and Google calendar documentation is.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/calendar.google/

After that to generate a Client ID and Client Secret needed for the Home Assistant Calendar – open this link.

This will start a mini wizard that will guide you during the process, but you better don’t just click on the buttons there without looking here, because you can easily get lost.

Then click on the “Go to credentials” button and on the next screen choose:

A new mini window will appear – just click on “SET UP CONSENT SCREEN”. A new tab will be opened with another question for you. 😉

On the next OAuth consent screen type a name and you don’t need to change anything else just click “SAVE” on the bottom of the page.

Now click on “Credentials” in the left sidebar and then on “+ CREATE CREDENTIALS”

As Application type choose the option “TVs and Limited input devices” from the dropdown menu.

Then type a name or leave the default value and click on the “CREATE” button.

Finally you will get your credentials that we need for Home Assistant Calendar.

Copy these credentials and store them somewhere safe (or you can remember them 😭) we will need them in few moments.

Putting the Google Calendar credentials in Home Assistant

We have the needed Google credentials, now let’s put them in the Home Assistant configuration to enable Home Assistant calendar. Please do not share these credentials with anyone unless you really trust him.

Open you configuration.yaml file with your favourite editor. Mine is the “File editor” available in Home Assistant Add-on store. Then copy and paste the following:

# Google calendar configuration.yaml entry
google:
  client_id: !secret google_client_id_calendar
  client_secret: !secret google_client_secret_calendar

After that open your secrets.yaml file and copy and paste the following, but don’t forget to change the Client ID and Client Secret with yours:

# Learn more at https://home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/secrets/
google_client_id_calendar: PASTE_YOUR_CLIENT_ID_HERE
google_client_secret_calendar: PASTE_YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET_HERE

When you are ready, go to Configuration -> Server Controls in Home Assistant. Check your configuration and if it’s all OK – hit the “RESTART” button under Server Management section that can be found on the same page.

Enable the Home Assistant Calendar menu

After the Home Assistant restart you will have a new authorisation notification and few steps that you have to execute to enable the Home Assistant calendar menu.

Don’t worry I will now show you how to do it. 

Paste the code in the screen that you will see when you open the link and click “Next” button. Sign in with your Google account.

Finally, click on the big blue “Allow” button.

If you get an Error 403: access_denied here there is a quick fix thanks to Jim who said this in the comments section bellow.

Just navigate to the Oauth consent screen settings, scroll to the Publishing Status section and make sure it is set to In production.

Thanks Jim! Now let’s continue with our Home Assistant Calendar setup.

You should see a “Success” message when you do that and that means that you now have Google Calendar in you Home Assistant calendar.

Congratulations! Now when there is an Event in Google Calendar you will see it in your Home Assistant calendar as well.

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Creating a Home Assistant automation that will be activated when an event in Google Calendar starts

We have Google calendar integrated in Home Assistant and also the Home Assistant calendar menu is now visible. Let’s make a Home Assistant automation that will be activated when an event in Google calendar starts.

Open your automations.yaml file in your favourite text editor and copy and paste the following lines:

#put this in automations.yaml
# Send Telegram when google calendar event start
- id: '435256'
  alias: send Telegram when google calendar event start
  trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: calendar.YOUR_ID_FOUND_IN_GOOGLE_CALENDARS.YAML_FILE
    to: 'on'
  action:
  - data:
      message: "Google Calendar event started! Maybe a new cool website article is posted, not like Kiril's articles..."
    service: notify.telegram

Don’t forget to replace the following text “YOUR_ID_FOUND_IN_GOOGLE_CALENDARS.YAML_FILE” with yours ID.

As the text says you can find the ID in the auto generated file named google_calendars.yaml. You will have such file auto generated when you integrate Google Calendar and Home Assistant calendar.

This automation will be triggered when an event in Google calendar starts and it will send a Telegram message with the text entered in the message: field.

If you want to enable Telegram notifications in your Home Assistant you can follow my tutorial about it.

Of course you can change the action part in the automation to suit your needs.

To test this automation just create an event in Google calendar, you event should become visible in Home Assistant calendar as well and when the event start – you should receive a Telegram notification.

Question for You!

Are you using any digital calendar? If yes which one exactly? Let me know in the comments on the b

Automatically create a Google calendar event when something happens in Home Assistant

Let’s try the opposite automation now –  when something happen in Home Assistant to automatically create a Google calendar event.

Open again your automations.yaml file and past the following lines inside it:

#put this in automations.yaml
# Create a Google calendar event when kitchen lights are turned on
- id: 'l34f43'
  alias: create an google calendar event when kitchen lights are turned on
  trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: light.kitchen_lights
      to: 'on'
  action:
    - service: google.add_event
      data:
        calendar_id: YOUR_GOOGLE_MAIL
        summary: 'test'
        start_date_time: 2020-05-24 09:40:00
        end_date_time: 2020-05-24 10:40:00

Don’t forget to change the “YOUR_GOOGLE_MAIL” text with your Calendar ID available in google_calendars.yaml file. Usually this is your Google mail/account that you used during the API credentials generation process.

The trigger for this automation is triggering the kitchen_lights entity in Home Assistant to “ON”. You can use whatever entity (Switch, light, binary sensor, etc.) you wish for the trigger.

The action is to call google.add_event service that will create an event in Google Calendar that will have for a Title the text entered in the summary and it will last from start_date_time till end_date_time.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to make the date dynamic, so the event start date to be the time when the Kitchen Lights is actually turned on.

I tried these templates as start_date_time, but they didn’t worked.

 # not working       start_date_time: {{ now().timestamp() | timestamp_custom("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", true) }}
 # not working       start_date_time: "{{ now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') }}"
 # not working       start_date_time: "{{ as_timestamp(now())|timestamp_custom('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') }}"

If you know how to make them work – let me know in the comments below the article. I will update the article and I will give all the credits to you for that. Only if you allow that of course 😁

Dynamic Dates UPDATE!

The issue with the static and dynamic is now solved thanks to the DarkFoxDK that commented below and the Clifford W. Hansen that commented under my video in YouTube. So the solution is simple but elegant and works perfectly.

You just have to add data_template, so the full automation with dynamic start and end date will look like this:

#put this in automations.yaml
- id: 'l34f43'
  alias: create a google calendar event when kitchen lights turned on
  trigger:
    - platform: state
      entity_id: light.kitchen_lights
      to: 'on'
  action:
    - service: google.add_event
      data:
        calendar_id: YOUR_GOOGLE_MAIL
        summary: 'test'
 #       For fixed dates uncomment and use these options:        
 #       start_date_time: 2020-05-25 12:50:00
 #       end_date_time: 2020-05-25 13:50:00
      data_template:
        # start_date_time will be time of the trigger event
        start_date_time: "{{ now().timestamp() | timestamp_custom('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', true)}}"
        # end_date_time will be +300 seconds later
        end_date_time: "{{ (now().timestamp() + 300) | timestamp_custom('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', true)}}"

Thank you DarkFoxDK and Clifford W. Hansen for the comments and help with this.

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I really hope that you find this information useful and you now know how to add Google calendar in Home Assistant and how to create automations after that.

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