0.97: Apache Kafka, Fortigate, Twente Milieu August 7, 2019 29 minutes reading time

It’s time for Home Assistant 0.97! It has been a very busy release cycle as we have been fine-tuning our development process, which makes it easier to maintain and contribute to Home Assistant in the future.

Python 3.5 support has been dropped

As per previous announcements, this is the first release that requires at least Python 3.6. If you are on Hassbian and are planning to upgrade Python, please take note of the known issues with the default wheel server.

Docker

This is the last release that bases our Home Assistant Docker image ( homeassistant/home-assistant ) on Debian. As decided in Architecture Decision Record 0006: Docker Images, the image will be based on Alpine Linux starting with the 0.98 release. These new Docker images will be running same the Home Assistant Docker image that powers Hass.io. You don’t need to change anything unless you have installed Debian packages manually or made any other changes to the running container. However, if that is the case, you’ll need to find the Alpine equivalent of whatever you were doing.

The main driver behind this change is that by re-using images, maintenance becomes easier, and users of the homeassistant/home-assistant image can benefit from the many optimizations that went into the Hass.io images.

Reload scenes from configuration.yaml

Thanks to @balloob it is now possible to reload scenes from configuration.yaml without restarting Home Assistant. This is part of an effort for Home Assistant 1.0 to make scenes a first-class citizen of Home Assistant, including creating/restoring scenes on the fly in the future. To track this effort, follow this page.

Home Assistant Cast

In case you missed the announcement, we released Home Assistant Cast yesterday. It allows you to transform any Cast interface into a display for Home Assistant. Read the announcement for more information..

Home Assistant Cast opens a whole new world of possibilities for using Lovelace, and we are really excited to learn what cool things you will do with it! If you created something, feel free to share it on social media using the #homeassistantcast hash-tag. We are looking forward to your pictures!

UI changes

This release contains a couple of notable UI changes:

New Cast row available in the Lovelace entities card to start Home Assistant Cast.

Improved accessibility for visually impaired users. This is an ongoing effort on making the frontend accessible.

Split out configuration.yaml actions from the core configuration into a new server control config panel. Thanks @IcyPalm

actions from the core configuration into a new server control config panel. Thanks @IcyPalm Markdown card now has a size + 1, if it has a header defined. Some layouts might be moved around due to this.

In other news

Frenck wrote an excellent blog post on how to make a $2 smart doorbell using Home Assistant and ESPHome, which doesn’t require soldering.

Aaron created a great and detailed tutorial explaining how to add an interactive 3D floorplan to Home Assistant.

We wrote about how we use Azure DevOps to automate the development of Home Assistant. Interested to see how Home Assistant is automatically build? Check the developer blog.

@jimz011 has updated his amazing, HomeKit inspired, Lovelace config and shared it on the forums. Sneak preview on how it looks:

New Integrations

Release 0.97.1 - August 9

A new breaking change was introduced with 0.97.1 to accommodate for the HaveIBeenPwned shutting down v2 of their API on August 18. The integration has been migrated to using v3.

Release 0.97.2 - August 11

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Breaking Changes

Beta Fixes

All changes