Entity management

Entities in Home Assistant are the building blocks of your home automation. Spook enhances the core of Home Assistant by adding actions to control those entities programmatically.

Actions¶

The following entity management actions are added to your Home Assistant instance:

Disable an entity¶

This action allows you to disable an entity on the fly.

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action: homeassistant.disable_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room

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action: homeassistant.disable_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling

Enable an entity¶

This action allows you to enable an entity on the fly.

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action: homeassistant.enable_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room

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action: homeassistant.enable_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling

Hide an entity¶

This action allows you to hide an entity on the fly.

It can be particularly useful when you have a lot of entities, and you want to hide some of them from the generated UI based programmatically. Hidden entities are not exposed to external voice assistants, like Google Assistant or Alexa, by default. They can still be exposed explicitly in the voice assistant settings.

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action: homeassistant.hide_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room

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action: homeassistant.hide_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling

Unhide an entity¶

This action allows you to unhide an entity on the fly.

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action: homeassistant.unhide_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room

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action: homeassistant.unhide_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling

Expose an entity to assistants¶

This action allows you to expose an entity to your voice assistants on the fly.

Home Assistant keeps a separate list per assistant of what it is allowed to see. This is the same setting you find under Settings > Voice assistants > Expose, applied to as many entities as you like at once.

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action: homeassistant.expose_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room
  assistants: conversation

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action: homeassistant.expose_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling
  assistants:
    - cloud.alexa
    - conversation

Stop exposing an entity to assistants¶

This action does the reverse of Expose an entity to assistants, taking an entity back out of a voice assistant’s reach.

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action: homeassistant.unexpose_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room
  assistants: conversation

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action: homeassistant.unexpose_entity
data:
  entity_id:
    - light.living_room
    - light.kitchen_ceiling
  assistants:
    - cloud.alexa
    - conversation

Update an entity’s ID¶

This action allows you to update an entity’s ID on the fly.

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action: homeassistant.update_entity_id
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room
  new_entity_id: light.dining_room

Delete all orphaned entities¶

Mass clean up your Home Assistant by deleting all orphaned entities in one go.

Orphaned entities are entities that are no longer claimed by an integration. This can happen when an integration is removed or when an integration is no longer working. Home Assistant considers an entity only orphaned if it has been unclaimed since the last restart of Home Assistant.

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action: homeassistant.delete_all_orphaned_entities

List all orphaned database entities¶

Mass clean up your database with the help of Spook by listing all orphaned database entities in one action.

Orphaned database entities are entities that are no longer claimed by integration but still exist in the database. This can happen when an integration is removed or when an entity is disabled.

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action: homeassistant.list_orphaned_database_entities

alias: Delete orphaned database entities
sequence:
  - action: homeassistant.list_orphaned_database_entities
    response_variable: orphaned
  - action: recorder.purge_entities
    target:
      entity_id: |
        {{ orphaned.entities }}
    data:
      keep_days: 0
mode: single

Rename an entity¶

This action allows you to update an entity friendly_name on the fly.

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action: homeassistant.rename_entity
data:
  entity_id: light.living_room
  name: "Living room light"

Blueprints & tutorials¶

There are currently no known blueprints or tutorials for the enhancements Spook provides for these features. If you created one or stumbled upon one, please let us know in our discussion forums.

Feature requests, ideas, and support¶

If you have an idea on how to further enhance this, for example, by adding a new action, entity, or repairs detection; feel free to let us know in our discussion forums.

Are you stuck using these new features? Or maybe you’ve run into a bug? Please check the page on where to go for help.