Installing HACS in Home Assistant

Installing HACS in Home Assistant
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Straight to the point: if you use Home Assistant and haven’t installed HACS yet, you’re missing half the fun.

In my case, I installed it because I needed LocalTuya. But there’s a whole new world of possibilities when using HACS.

Why install HACS?

HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) is like that parallel market where good things happen: new integrations, beautiful cards, elegant themes, bizarre automations that nobody asked for, but you’ll definitely want to test.

In my case, the focus was to escape the Tuya cloud. LocalTuya gives me local control over my devices, without depending on the goodwill of servers on the other side of the planet.

This change brings an absurd lag reduction effect in actions. Very noticeable when having actions on virtual parallel buttons, like for example turning on a light where the lamp feedback is on another switch, it becomes instantaneous.

Grab your coffee, because nerdiness without coffee is a sin.

How to install HACS

There are three installation methods, depending on how your Home Assistant is running. Let’s break it down.

Home Assistant OS / Supervised

  1. Access this link to add the HACS repository to your system: Open in Home Assistant

  2. When the confirmation appears, click Open Link.

  3. In the missing repository dialog, click Add.

  4. Go to Supervisor > Add-on Store, search for HACS and install.

  5. Start the add-on and go to the logs. Follow the instructions that appear there.

Finishing:

  • Restart Home Assistant.
  • Go to Settings > Integrations and add HACS.
  • Follow the steps for GitHub authentication.
Home Assistant in Container
  1. Open the terminal of your host machine.
  2. Access the container with:
docker exec -it container_name bash
  1. Run the installation script:
wget -O, https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -

Finishing:

  • Restart the HA container.
  • Go to Settings > Integrations and add HACS.
  • Authenticate with GitHub.
Home Assistant Core (manually installed)
  1. In the terminal, access the user that runs HA.
  2. Run the script:
wget -O, https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -

Finishing:

  • Restart Home Assistant.
  • Go to Settings > Integrations and add HACS.
  • Authenticate with GitHub.
After installation…

Now the HACS menu will appear in your sidebar. And with it, the portal of possibilities:

  • If you use Tuya, I already recommend: install LocalTuya.
  • Explore cards like button-card, mini-graph-card, weather-card.
  • Change the Lovelace theme and have total control of dashboards.
  • Update everything right there, without having to download zip, copy folder, restart 17 times…

Installing HACS was like unlocking Home Assistant’s turbo mode.

It’s like unlocking a sea of possibilities, escaping the basics, testing new things and driving your wife crazy when something fails. And it will fail.

If you’re still stuck only with official integrations, you’re missing the most fun part of the game. Go ahead and install it. Then tell me what you thought. Or better, don’t tell me anything… just show the beautiful graph that appeared on the dashboard.

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