@epdoc/node-red-hautil

THIS PROJECT IS STILL IN DEVELOPMENT. All APIs and documentation are subject to change.

General purpose utilities for use with Node-RED and Home Assistant.

• Service wrapper, to generate payloads for use with the Call Service node.
• HA wrapper, to retrieve state from home assistant

Build

git clone @epdoc/node-red-hautil
cd node-red-hautil
npm install
npm test
npm run build
npm run publish

Installation and Configuration

Standalone Node-RED refers to an instance of a Node-RED server that you've installed and configured and that does not use the Home Assistant Node-RED Addon.

In the Node-Red settings folder for your standalone Node-RED deployment, add these dependencies to package.json.

npm install node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket
npm install @epdoc/typeutil @epdoc/node-red-hautil

Start or restart Node-Red. The nodes in node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket will appear automatically in your node list.

You can use pm2 start node-red or pm2 restart node-red. Or you can add these script commands to your package.json file.

  "scripts": {
    "start": "pm2 start node-red",
    "restart": "pm2 restart node-red",
    "stop": "pm2 stop node-red"
  }

Node-RED with Home Assistant Add-on

If Node-Red is running under Home Assistant you can restart Node-RED from Settings > Add-ons > Node-Red.

For module updates you can edit the version number in package.json, delete node_modules/@epdoc/node-red-hautil, then restart Node-RED.

There are a number of module loading limitations when using the Node-RED Addon.

Configure a Home Assistant Server

For a standalone deployment, drag one of the home assistant nodes onto a flow page. Open the node and add a new Server by clicking the pencil icon.

On the server Properties tab enter the following:

• Name - a distinguishing name for this particular home assistant server
• Base URL - Something of the form http://10.0.0.10:8123
• Access Token - Get a long lived access token from the home assistant UI by clicking your profile icon (lower right corner), opening the security tab and scrolling to the bottom of the page.
• Enable global context store - Enable this so that global.get('homeassistant') will work in your function nodes.

Once created, the server settings can subsequently be found and edited in the Configuration Nodes tab.

Load @epdoc/node-red-hautil

For convenience you can add @epdoc/node-red-hautil and other utilities to the global context, so that you don't need to specify the module in each Function Node where it is used.

You can find a discussion of various ways to use your own libraries in Node-RED here.

Library Reference

Service Class

The Service object is used to build a payload that can be passed to the Call Service node. Provided too are a number of subclasses for specific types of entities, including SwitchService, LightService, AlarmService, CoverService, FanService and, finally FanSpeed6Service, which is a 6-speed fan that uses a Bond Bridge to set the fan speed and a smart switch to turn the fans on and off.

There is the possibility for many more subclasses to be written, or you can build your service payload directly using the base Service class, or one of the other subclasses.

The following shows the code for a function node that uses three equivalent implementations to tell a Cover to stop.

let payload = newService('cover.garage').service('stop_cover').payload();

payload = new CoverService('garage').stop().payload();

let payloadBuilder = newCoverService('garage');
payload = payloadBuilder.stop().payload();
msg.payload = payload;
return msg;

The following function node code creates a payload that can be used to set a light's brightness to 50%.

msg.payload = new LightService('bedroom').percentage(50).payload();
return msg;

The following function node code shows several ways to create a payload that turns a light on.

// In this example we directly use the LightService, 
// which will set the domain to `light` for us. 
// The LightService is a subclass of SwitchService.
msg.payload = new LightService('bedroom').on().payload();

// In this example we use the SwitchService, but change it's default
// domain from `switch` to `light` by specifying the full `entity_id`.
msg.payload = new SwitchService('light.bedroom').on().payload();

// Override the default domain using the `domain` method.
msg.payload = new SwitchService('bedroom').domain('light').on().payload();
return msg;

HA Class

The HA class provides a wrapper for a Home Assistant instance, and has methods to access the state of Home Assitant entities.

Example retrieves the state of a light.

const ha = new HA(global,'homeAssistant');
const lightEntity = ha.entity('light.bedroom');
const isOn = lightEntity.isOn();
node.warn(`The ${lightEntity.id} is ${isOn?'on':'off'}`)

HA retrieveSensorsData method

This method takes a dictionary containing an id field and optional type field and retrieves sensor data for the listed sensors. This is a shortcut that you might use when you have multiple sensors that you efficiently want to get data for, and you need to access that data more than once.

const gHA = global.get('homeassistant');
const homeAssistant:HomeAssistant = gHA['homeAssistant']
const ha = new HA(homeAssistant);

const sensorDict = {
  sensor1: { id: 'input_boolean.evening', type: 'boolean' },
  sensor2: { id: 'sensor.outdoor_temperature', type: 'number' }
};

ha.retrieveSensorsData(sensorDict);
if( sensorDict.sensor1.on ) {
  console.log('It is the evening');
}
if( sensorDict.sensor2.val > 30 ) {
  console.log('It is hot today');
}

The above code is equivalent to the following:

const ha = new HA(global);

if( ha.entity('input_boolean.evening').isOn() ) {
  console.log('It is the evening');
}
if( ha.entity('sensor.outdoor_temperature').asNumber() > 30 ) {
  console.log('It is hot today');
}

Developer Notes

This module was originally written in ES6 and transpiled using Babel to generate a module that could be loaded using require or import. Soon thereafter it was migrated to TypeScript (developer hint: this resulted in catching quite a few bugs). It was also migrated to Bun for package management and unit testing, however the Typescript Compiler (tsc) is used for module generation, due to limitations in bun's bundling options .