homeassistant-cli_skill

Overview

This skill provides advanced Home Assistant control using the official hass-cli tool, delivering an interactive, discovery-friendly command-line experience. It adds auto-completion, real-time event monitoring, history queries, and flexible output formatting for faster troubleshooting and exploration. Use it when you want richer interactivity and readable output compared to curl-based approaches.

How this skill works

The skill wraps the hass-cli feature set to query states, call services, watch events, and retrieve history from a configured Home Assistant instance. It relies on a long-lived access token and HASS_SERVER/HASS_TOKEN environment variables to authenticate and communicate with the Home Assistant API. Output can be formatted as table, YAML, or JSON and supports no-headers mode for scripting.

When to use it

• You interact frequently with Home Assistant from the terminal and want auto-completion and discovery.
• You need real-time event monitoring (state changes, automation triggers) in a console.
• You want history queries and human-friendly output (YAML/JSON/table) for debugging.
• You prefer an interactive CLI to explore entities and services instead of crafting curl commands.
• You need richer output formatting for logs, troubleshooting, or manual checks.

Best practices

• Generate and store a long-lived Home Assistant access token and set HASS_SERVER and HASS_TOKEN in your shell config for persistence.
• Enable shell auto-completion (bash/zsh/fish) to speed up entity and service discovery.
• Use output flags (-o yaml or -o json) when sharing results or piping into parsers; use --no-headers for scripts.
• Prefer service list and state list to discover IDs before calling services to avoid errors.
• Test connection with hass-cli info after configuring the token and server to confirm access.

Example use cases

• Quickly list all lights and inspect current states: hass-cli state list light
• Turn on a light with brightness: hass-cli service call light.turn_on --arguments entity_id=light.bedroom,brightness=128
• Monitor state changes during a device test: hass-cli event watch state_changed
• Retrieve the last hour of history for multiple entities for troubleshooting: hass-cli state history --since 1h light.living_room switch.fan
• List services and view details in YAML before invoking to confirm arguments: hass-cli -o yaml service list homeassistant.toggle