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Custom UI elements

Steps to rebrand current Home Assistant system to Pod Companion

1. setup development environment for home assistant system customization

The easiest way to get started with development is to use Visual Studio Code with devcontainers. This approach will create a preconfigured development environment with all the tools you need. This approach is enabled for all Home Assistant repositories. Learn more about devcontainers.

Prerequisites

Getting started:

  1. Go to Home Assistant core repository and click "fork".
  2. Once your fork is created, copy the URL of your fork and paste it below, then open the link.
    vscode://ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers/cloneInVolume?url=<forked repo url>
  3. Your browser will prompt you if you want to use Visual Studio Code to open the link, click "Open Link".
  4. When Visual Studio Code asks if you want to install the Remote extension, click "Install".
  5. The Dev Container image will then be built (this may take a few minutes), after this your development environment will be ready.

In the future, if you want to get back to your development environment: open Visual Studio Code, click on the "Remote Explorer" button in the sidebar, select "Containers" at the top of the sidebar

Tasks​

The devcontainer comes with some useful tasks to help you with development, you can start these tasks by opening the command palette and select Tasks: Run Task then select the task you want to run.

When a task is currently running (like Preview for the docs), it can be restarted by opening the command palette and selecting Tasks: Restart Running Task, then select the task you want to restart.

Manual Environment​

You only need these instructions if you do not want to use devcontainers.

It is also possible to set up a more traditional development environment. See the section for your operating system. Make sure your Python version is 3.9 or later.

Developing on Linux​

Install the core dependencies.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev python3-venv autoconf libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg-dev libffi-dev libudev-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavdevice-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavresample-dev libavfilter-dev ffmpeg

Developing on Windows​

To develop on Windows, you will need to use the Linux subsystem (WSL). Follow the WSL installation instructions and install Ubuntu from the Windows Store. Once you're able to access Linux, follow the Linux instructions.

TIP

If you find that you cannot open the development instance via http://localhost:8123 when using WSL, instead, within a WSL terminal, find the inet address of the eth0 adaptor by running ip addr show eth0. Then use this address, excluding the CIDR block, to access the development instance, i.e. if your inet is listed as 172.20.37.6/20, use http://172.20.37.6:8123.

Freshly installed WSL distribution​

The first time a WSL distribution is started, and the default WSL user account is created, the Windows drives will still be mounted with all files owned by root:root instead of owned by the default user, i.e. with uid=0,gid=0 included in the mount options as shown by:

user@DESKTOP:/mnt/c/Users/user$ mount | grep mnt
C:\ on /mnt/c type drvfs (rw,noatime,uid=0,gid=0,case=off)

This will cause the setup script to fail with an unrelated error if the local repository is on a Windows drive. To recover, WSL must be restarted after which the Windows drives will be mounted with all files owned by the default WSL user. This can be accomplished by simply restarting the computer, or by issuing the following command from a windows command prompt:

wsl --shutdown

After WSL is restarted, the mount's uid and gid will match the default user.

Developing on macOS​

Install Homebrew, then use that to install the dependencies:

brew install python3 autoconf ffmpeg

If you encounter build issues with cryptography when running the script/setup script below, check the cryptography documentation for installation instructions.

Setup Local Repository​

Visit the Home Assistant Core repository and click Fork. Once forked, setup your local copy of the source using the commands:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/core.git
cd core
git remote add upstream https://github.com/home-assistant/core.git

Install the requirements with a provided script named setup.

script/setup

This will create a virtual environment and install all necessary requirements. You're now set!

Each time you start a new terminal session, you will need to activate your virtual environment:

source venv/bin/activate

After that you can run Home Assistant like this:

hass -c config

The Home Assistant configuration is stored in the config directory in your repository.


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