Home Assistant is the most popular self-hosted service for managing smart devices, and for good reason. It’s compatible with tons of IoT paraphernalia, includes robust trigger-action automations, and has a handful of neat add-ons that further bolster its functionality. HASS also offers custom dashboards, automation blueprints, and some other useful settings hidden inside a barrage of menus. Then there’s the Home Assistant Community Store, an underrated utility that can up your HASS game.

What’s HACS, anyway?

It’s not an add-store

As you may have guessed from the name, the Home Assistant Community Store, or HACS, is a library containing tons of scripts, customization widgets, and integrations designed by the HASS community. Technically, you could install many of these integrations on Home Assistant, but HACS makes setting up third-party tools a breeze. Heck, even when HACS doesn’t include the integrations, you could use the repository tab to manually pair them with the community store. While it may seem like an alternative to the Home Assistant add-on store, HACS had nothing to do with add-ons (barring one that you need to use when setting up the platform).

Setting up HACS

You’ll need a GitHub account

Unlike the built-in tools on Home Assistant, HACS is a little cumbersome to set up. Assuming you’re on the OS-variant of Home Assistant, you’ll have to download the Get HACS add-on from this link. Once Get HASS shows up inside Home Assistant, you’ll want to start the add-on before waiting a couple of minutes for it to do its magic. Soon, Get HACS will cease functioning, and you’ll want to reload Home Assistant, which you can do by tapping the Restart button within the Developer Tools.

Since the container version of Home Assistant doesn’t feature the ability to set up add-ons, you’ll have to follow an alternate method to add the HACS integration to the smart home management platform. Assuming that you’re using Docker as the container engine, you’ll have to access the Home Assistant server’s terminal using the docker exec command before using wget to download the HACS repo:

  • sudo docker exec -it home_assistant_container_name bash
  • wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -

After your HASS instance reloads, you’ll want to head to the Integrations tab within Devices & Services. Tapping the Add Integration button will reveal a pop-up window, where you’ll want to search for HACS. The Home Assistant Community Store will display a couple of acknowledgments, and you’ll have to enter your GitHub account credentials once you accept them. Finally, you’ll be able to use HACS and its battalion of integrations after authorizing the community store to connect to your GitHub account.

Why should you bother using HACS?

Integrations for unsupported smart devices

If you’re wondering whether HACS is worth the setup procedure, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to run it on your Home Assistant setup. Despite supporting a multitude of smart devices and IoT paraphernalia, there are tons of devices that won’t work with Home Assistant right out of the box. Fortunately, HACS houses plenty of community-created integrations designed to help you manage unsupported devices from your Home Assistant instance.

For example, I’ve got a Dreame smart vacuum cleaner that doesn’t pair with a vanilla HASS server. HACS, however, includes a dedicated Dreame integration that lets me control as well as automate my cleaning gizmo.

Plenty of dashboards, cards, and themes

The default Home Assistant dashboard doesn’t look bad by any means, but it’s far from ideal for folks who want to customize their smart home management interface. If you’re not fond of designing your dashboards from scratch, you can use certain templates from HACS to make your Home Assistant layout look more pleasing to the eye. Dwains Dashboard is one of my favorites, and HACS makes setting it up a breeze.

For tinkerers who prefer building everything from scratch, you can arm your Home Assistant instance with several cards, themes, graphs, and templates from HACS. Then you’ve got some miscellaneous tools, like weather widgets that can pull data from websites, calendar elements capable of syncing with your preferred schedule management app, as well as tools designed to make your HASS mobile UI look more appealing.

I can even pair my home lab components with Home Assistant

As someone who’s addicted to home labs, I love how well certain HACS integrations pair with my server nodes. I use Gotify to manage notifications from my workstations, and the Home Assistant Community Store includes a dedicated integration that connects my alert system with my HASS setup. While we’re on the subject of self-hosted apps, the Frigate integration directly pulls video feed from my surveillance cameras and displays it on my Home Assistant UI.

If you’re a data hoarder like I am, you’ll be able to pull your NAS statistics into your Home Assistant UI using the OpenMediaVault integration. And this article won’t be complete until I mention the Proxmox integration, which not only displays the essential data from my PVE nodes, but also lets me control them from custom HASS dashboards.