Home Assistant How To Install HACS

Oct 18, 2022 · 3 mins read

In the video below, we show how to install HACS in Home Assistant

There are a lot of community developers out there making dashboard features and integrations that Home Assistant doesn’t know about out of the box

While you can search for and install these manually, there is add-on called HACS which will do this for you

Home Assistant Community Store does require manual installation and it does require you to have a GitHub account

But once installed it can make finding, installing and maintaining community integrations and frontend software a lot easier

Useful links:
https://github.com/
https://hacs.xyz/docs/setup/download

Steps Taken

Create a GitHub account
HACs needs access to a GitHub account because it needs to search repositories
Even if you already have an account, creating one specifically for HACS makes security sense
While you’re at it, set up a new email account just for this GitHub account
Follow the sign up process and enable Two-Factor Authentication using a software app of your choice for better security
Install HACs
Connect to Home Assistant using SSH as root
Now run the following command to download and execute a script the developer has created
```
wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -
```
TIP: Open a web browser to https://get.hacs.xyz to see what this script does though as you should only run scripts you trust

Restart Home Assistant, log back in and hit Ctrl-F5 to clear the web browser’s cache
Navigate to Settings | Integrations and click Add Integration
Type in hacs to filter the list, then click HACS as the integration we want to install
Confirm the pre-check list options then click Submit
Hover your mouse over the GitHub link to make sure it is genuine then click this
If you are already logged in you will be asked to allow HACs access to your account, otherwise you will need to login
Back on Home Assistant, copy the key that is provided by HACS in step 2 and paste this into GitHub then click Continue
Next, click “Authorize hacs” to complete the process then close the GitHub browser tab
Back on Home Assistant, you will now have a dialogue box to complete the installation, so you can set an area of your house for HACs if you want and/or click Finish
You should now see HACS as a new integration and also a shortcut in the left hand side bar as it is ready to use
How to use HACS
If you want to install something known to HACS, click HACS in the left hand pane
To install an Integration for instance, select Integrations then click Explore & Download Repositories
To install a Dashboard option, select FrontEnd then click Explore & Download Repositories
Either takes you to a list of known repositories which you can filter by typing in the search engine
Once you have found what you want to install you can select it and follow the installation process

TIP: Integrations require to then follow the usual process to install an integration
Frontend software usually requires you to make additional configuration changes so Home Assistant will load them once installed