Artur's Labels

This custom component for Home Assistant expands the use of Labels in the system. The goal is for it to become the one, customizable, powerful system for all the grouping and targeting of entities that a user might ever need.

As the name implies I made it primarily for my own usage. Since I put in all that work though, I thought it might be useful to some other people as well, so I decided to share it here.

What does it do?

Currently this component makes it possible for labels to form hierarchies. Any label can become a child of any other label. This means that an entity that is assigned a child label by the user, will be assigned every parent label automatically by the system. Additionally it is possible to formulate dynamic rules for label membership, that will be automatically evaluated.

Start guide

To use this component, follow the below steps.

Before doing anything, read the entire README first.

Create labels

First create all the labels you might need, using the normal UI interface of Home Assistant.

As an example, let's use the following labels:

• Home
• Ground floor
• First floor
• Kitchen
• Pantry
• Living Room
• TV Area
• Bedroom 1
• Bedroom 2
• Office
• Desk Area
• Stairs
• Low light rooms

These are just area-related labels. You might also consider making more functional labels, like:

• Sensors
• Motion sensors
• Security motion sensors
• Water pumps
• Critical
• Battery devices
• Important Battery devices
• Important

Off course there are many other possibilities. The whole point of the system is that it is extremely flexible and can therefore fit a large group of diverse use cases.

Get the label ids

Once you have your labels created, you need to get their label_ids. The easiest way is to go to the templates section in the developer tools and use the code:

{% for lbl in labels() -%}
{{ lbl }}: {{ label_name(lbl) }}
{% endfor %}

Make sure to copy the result and store it safely.

Create label relations

In order to create relations between labels, you need to designate parents of every label. For identifying each label use its label_id. As an example, here's what you can put in your configuration.yaml file:

arturs_labels:
  labels:
    ground_floor:
      parents:
        - home
    pantry:
      parents:
        - ground_floor
        - low_light_rooms
    living_room:
      parents:
        - ground_floor
    tv_area:
      parents:
        - living_room
    first_floor:
      parents:
        - home
    stairs:
      parents:
        - ground_floor
        - first_floor
    office:
      parents:
        - first_floor
        - low_light_rooms
    motion_sensors:
      parents:
        - sensors
    security_motion_sensors:
      parents:
        - motion_sensors
        - critical
    water_pumps:
      parents:
        - critical

Each time you make changes to the configuration, you have to reload the component or restart Home Assistant.

Create label rules (optionally)

You can also define fully dynamic rules for label membership. This is useful, when you want your entity to be assigned a label only if it already has some combination of other labels.

arturs_labels:
  labels:
    battery:
      parents:
        - sensors
  label_rules:
    important_battery: label("battery") and label("important")

Install prerequisites

Make sure to install Early Loader before installing this component.

Install the component

This component can be installed using HACS.

• Add this repository as a custom integration repository to HACS.
• The integration should now be available in HACS.
• Install it like every other HACS integration.
• Restart Home Assistant.

Assign the labels

After restarting Home Assistant make sure that everything works correctly. If it does, you can now assign labels to your entities, if you didn't do it previously.

One unfortunate limitation of the Home Assistant frontend is that it does not distinguish between assigned and effective labels. For this reason special virtual assign: labels are created. In order to change the entity labels, you change only those special labels, everything else will be applied automatically each time you save your changes.

Usage

Service actions

You can target labels in your services. By targeting a parent label, you will automatically target all the entities of the child labels as well.

Devices

You can assign labels not only to entities, but also to devices. Every label, that you assign to a device, will be acquired by all its entities automatically.

Templates

The template label_entities(label_name_or_id) will allow you to get all the entities, for which the specified label is the effective label. The same is true for label_devices(label_name_or_id) with respect to devices. On the other hand labels(entity_id) will return only directly assigned labels to a given entity.

Areas

This extensive labeling system is meant to effective replace the need for areas. For this reason areas will be functionally disabled. You will not be able to target an area in service actions or templates. Instead just target the appropriate label.

Voice assistants

To be able to target areas with Home Assistant Assist, special area emulation is performed. To enable it, simply list which labels correspond to areas. For example:

arturs_labels:
  areas: [ground_floor, living_room, tv_area]
  labels:
    ground_floor:
      parents:
        - home
    living_room:
      parents:
        - ground_floor
    tv_area:
      parents:
        - living_room
    battery_devices:
      parents:
        - sensors

The voice assistant is specially patched to support full capabilities of the system. When you target a parent area, all entities from child areas will be automatically included.

External voice assistants are not supported. They tend to have their own area systems, which are not capable of arbitrary nesting.

The LLM-based assistants are currently not supported, but may be in the future.

Disclaimer

This is a beta release. Due to the nature of the system, this component has to integrate very deeply with Home Assistant internals, making it uniquely susceptible to breakage. This means you have to be careful with updates, always have a backup ready just in case.

As this component is still in very active development, some changes in configuration options and system behaviour might be required in the future. Make sure to always read the release notes and make the necessary adjustments.

Support

If you want to support this project, then the best way to do it, is to give it a try and let me know what you think.