0.105: Safe mode, Headers & Footers, New Zones Editor, Garmin, Sighthound February 5, 2020 54 minutes reading time

In case you have missed it, we decided to change the names we use here at Home Assistant, you can read all about it in this blog post.

Therefore, this is release 0.105 of the Home Assistant Core!

The old “States UI” is now deprecated

In June 2018, we released Home Assistant 0.72, which introduced Lovelace. It became our official default user interface in January 2019, with the release of Home Assistant 0.86.

This means, it is now over a year ago that Lovelace was officially introduced as a replacement for the states UI, so it is time to say goodbye to the old states UI. This release deprecates it and in version 0.107, the states UI will be removed from Home Assistant completely.

If you are not using Lovelace yet, we advise you to switch to it today. Lovelace is, by default, almost the same as old states UI with the bonus of a lot of flexibility, if you want it.

In addition to this, all configuration options for the States UI are deprecated as well. Please be sure to read the breaking changes to see if you have options that need to be removed from your configuration.

Safe mode

We are humans, and we do make typos. However, if we make a typo in our configuration, we might end up with Home Assistant being completely unreachable. That really is not helpful. You lose access to Home Assistant and have to do a deep dive via other methods to find out: Why did this happen?

This release introduces a “Safe mode” for Home Assistant. If during startup, Home Assistant has problems reading your configuration (for whatever reason), it will still continue to start using bits and pieces from the configuration of the last time it did start.

When this happens, Home Assistant will start in “Safe mode”. In this mode, nothing is loaded, but it does give you access to the Home Assistant frontend, settings and add-ons (for example, the VSCode or Configurator add-on). This gives you the possibility to correct the issue and restart Home Assistant to re-try.

Screenshot of Home Assistant started in safe mode.

Please note, that this feature isn’t perfect yet, and only works if Home Assistant was able to start successfully, after upgrading to this release, at least once.

We believe this feature makes Home Assistant more robust, easier to use and more forgiving, even if you made a mistake.

Revamped Supervisor panel

Remember we used to have a Hass.io panel? Well, with the new naming for Home Assistant, it has been renamed to the Supervisor panel.

So @ludeeus has been busy! He rewrote the entire Supervisor panel to match our current frontend technologies and added some really slick new visual elements to it.

Thanks, @ludeeus, it looks incredible!

Screenshot of the revamped Supervisor panel.

The new icons on the add-ons really make the add-on dashboard & store stand out. Also, new status indicators on the add-on cards make it easy to spot add-ons that need to be upgraded, or in case of visiting the add-on store, are installed already.

Please note, you need to be running Home Assistant Core 0.105 to see the new icons.

Configuration panel changes

In this release, we started the overhaul of the configuration panel. We have accumulated a lot of functionality in the configuration section in the last releases; now, it is time to bring it all together.

In upcoming releases, we will make changes to make things easier to find and connect the different elements with each other, making it easier to navigate around. For now, we implemented configuration sections, a new tabbed UI, as well as some visual tweaks.

Also updated, the device page to show the automations, scripts, and scenes a device is used in and added the ability to create new ones with the device easily.

Screenshot of the new device info page.

In the more info dialog of entities, we changed the settings button to open the entity settings dialog, and added a related tab as well! This allows you to can see what device, integration, area, scenes, scripts, automations, entities, and groups belong to that entity.

For scenes, scripts and automations that are created in the UI, an edit button is added, right in the more info dialog so you can easily edit it without searching for it.

Header & Footer for the entities card

Two new types are added to the entities card, a header and a footer. At this moment, we have two options for these, an image and buttons.

It allows you to create some very cool looking cards, but also provides you the option to put buttons in the bottom of the card. Very useful for buttons that activate scenes, for example.

Screenshot of the new header and footer for entities card.

Improved zones editor

A brand new zone editor! You can no longer find your zones in the integration list, but they moved to their own section in the configuration panel.

In this new editor, you can move your zones with drag and drop and even change the size of your zones by dragging the circle.

Adding, and removing zones or changing the name of a zone, is now easier than ever.

Screen recording of the zones editor.

The new editor will only work for zones that are created in the UI, zones that are set up in configuration.yaml are read-only. Additionally, if you define zones in your YAML configuration, please be aware that setting a name is now required.

As an extra added bonus, a new service was added: zone.reload . This service allows you to reload your zone configuration without restarting Home Assistant.

Icons no longer change color based on state

A change that is not really apparent at first, but you probably notice it sooner or later.

The entities card no longer changes the colors of icons based on states, except for lights.

Reasoning comes from a request, to make icons to become yellow for all types when an entity is active, and not for just a few entity types. However, this would get out of control very quickly, as shown in the screenshot below.

Yellow icon color on everything, isn't the solution either.

So, that is why we disabled it, by default, for all entity types, except lights. However, we did add a new option: state_color . Using this option, you can decide if you want to old behavior back, add it to more entity types or maybe even disable it for lights too!

Other cards will now display icons from more domains with an active color.

Other Lovelace and frontend improvements

There is a lot more done on Lovelace, more than we can mention, some other highlights:

In generated mode, entities that start with the name of the area or group they are in will be shown without the name of the area or group. So if you have a light named “Living room lights” that is in the area “Living room” they will be shown as “lights” in a card with the header “Living room”.

We no longer show device_tracker entities in generated mode. We advise you to bind one or more device trackers to a person that will be shown in the UI.

We added many accessibility features to Lovelace; you can navigate almost everything with the tab key. We will continue to work on this so that people with disabilities can also enjoy Home Assistant.

For a full list of changes, see the Lovelace changelog.

Even more frontend improvements:

Logbook panel is a lot quicker

Maps no longer fit zones, but only entities

ZHA panel now supports binding devices to groups

Ability to add new areas on the device page

Material Design Icons are updated to v4.8.95

A lot, like a really large amount, of bug fixes!

In other news

This section is now empty, but don’t be sad! The in “In other news” section now has its own dedicated blog post, which we will put out regularly:

Want to read the first edition? Community Highlights, first edition!

Have you seen (or made) something awesome, interesting, unique, amazing, inspirational, unusual or funny, using Home Assistant? Send us your Community Highlight suggestion, so that we can include it in the next blog post.

New Integrations

New Platforms

If you need help…

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

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

Removed

Hats over your heart for these shuttered integrations. Pour one out for:

PostNL Removed - PostNL changed their unofficial API and implemented protection, which breaks the integration. It has been confirmed through them that there is no workaround and no likely solution any time in the near future, so it is being removed. - (@peternijssen - #30902)

Cisco Spark Removed - Cisco Spark has been rebranded to Cisco Webex Teams. Cisco Webex Teams is available as integration in Home Assistant, which can be used as a replacement. - (@frenck - #30738)

Owlet - Removed - The API that the Owlet component was based on has been deprecated by the vendor. There is no other public API provided by the vendor that the component can be upgraded to use, so the component has been removed. - (@oblogic7 - #31160)

Hook Removed - The hook integration has been removed due to the shutdown of the connected service. All servers that have been providing this service will be turned off on 31 Jan 2020. - (@springstan - #31046)

Release 0.105.1 - February 5

Release 0.105.2 - February 6

Release 0.105.3 - February 10

Release 0.105.4 - February 14

Release 0.105.5 - February 17

Beta Fixes

All changes