An Idea to Make AppDaemon More Accessible

I am a huge fan of AppDaemon, and I think one of the things that makes it great is how portable and transferable apps are. However, I think it’s a feature that could be utilized more. I know there have been a few AD apps that have been distributed more widely and are totally configurable in apps.yaml only, without any of the underlying Python code being modified. Occusim and Schedy are a couple that come to mind.

However, I had the idea to take this a step further and create something akin to the custom_components and custom_cards repositories on GitHub perhaps. I also reached out to @ludeeus about potentially leverage HACS to allow people to install AD apps that would automatically update. And if that doesn’t work out, I have a few other ideas around developing a standard process for AD apps that could update themselves automatically.

I really think this is something that could help expose the power and flexibility of AppDaemon to an even wider audience, but obviously for something like this to work it would need the support of the community behind it. So, before @ludeeus considers adding AD functionality to HACS, or before I start thinking about alternative options for distributing ready-to-use apps that can update themselves, I wanted to put out feelers here and get some opinions.

  • I am a user who would like more ready-to-use AppDaemon apps, and a standard process to update them
  • I write AppDaemon apps and I am interested in a standardized way to distribute ready-to-use apps to the community

0 voters

In case you haven’t seen the news, HACS now supports AppDaemon apps as of 0.9.0. Users just need to add appdaemon: True to the hacs section of their configuration.yaml file. Developers just need to follow the instructions at https://custom-components.github.io/hacs/developer/general/ and https://custom-components.github.io/hacs/developer/appdaemon/ to make their apps HACS compatible. Optionally, you can also follow the instructions at https://custom-components.github.io/hacs/developer/include_default_repositories/ to make an app part of the default list of repositories that HACS looks at. I have a handful of apps I submitted as default repositories to launch with the functionality, and I’m going to be working on a few more over the next several weeks. If you’re interested in getting into AppDaemon as a user, I’d definitely recommend checking this out! On Hass.io, it’s now dead-simple to both install AppDaemon and have a couple apps to get you started. And if you’re a developer, I hope you take a look at the options for making your apps available and auto-updating for a broader community if you have apps that are not specific to your Hass setup!

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