Guest Frontend Access

Configuration
1

Hello HAers,

I am wondering if there is anyway I can create a guest frontend, with only some entities exposed. Here are two scenarios I am trying to implement:

  1. I have several entities for controlling lights, etc in a shared backyard. So I would like to give my neighbor with whom I share the backyard access to those entities, but not control over the lights inside my house, for example.
  2. If I have a guest staying at my place while I am out of town, I would like them to be able to control the lights, but not be able to access the admin interfaces, configurator, etc.

I have looked for this and can’t find much. I only found this older post that doesnt have a definite answer: Custom Guest Access (Permissions System)

any ideas? maybe I can use the dashboard add-on with separate credentials? It would mean creating a whole new dashboard, and it wouldn’t be the nice lovelace UI, but it seems like it might be the only option unless I am missing something obvious.

1 Like
2

I think in the future you’ll be able to restrict certain user accounts to only see/control certain things, but I’m not sure when/if that may be coming.

In the meantime, one solution could be to just run a second Home Assistant instance that connects to certain entities in your main instance. Then you can create a “guest” user on there and share the password with whoever you want to have access.

3

Thanks! Yea, I had considered a second instance - I wonder if a Pi Zero W is powerful enough. I guess it could just use the main instance’s MQTT broker, but I wonder how I would deal with the z-wave, since the usb zwave hub is in the other one.

I might also just create a node-red dashboard, or a dashboard with the hassio dashboard add-on

4

There is some discussion on this topic and probably some others on the forum where people seem to be using the Pi Zero W successfully. I wouldn’t bother trying to duplicate your setup on the second Pi and instead chain them together to where the Pi Zero W is just updating/reading states from your main instance through something like the RESTful Switch. That way you only need Z-Wave, MQTT, etc. on the main instance.

I don’t have experience with the various dashboard options, but I imagine one of those could work if they supported their own login information.

5

If you have more complicated things like brightness, you may have to get more creative and use things like Light Template to call scripts to make REST API calls or sync everything between the two instances via a special MQTT topic.

Check out this topic if you decide to go the MQTT route.

6

Those are some good ideas, thanks! I think I might try a dashboard option first since I have played with the node-red dashboard before, and that way I don’t need to maintain two instances - even though it will not be as nice as a HA front end. Anyway, I will post here with my solution once I get it going.