HACS is such a major part of Home Assistant. While I understand separation to keep some QC of integrations, I feel we can achieve this by different methods. Following is personal preference/proposal.
HACS - On/off option
To install HACS, I hope we have simple On/Off in UI may be under integration page. When turning it on, it warns user, this is not officially supported. When user agrees, it gives step by step instruction for GitHub account creation and token generation.
Unified Integration List/Store
Once HACS are installed/turned on, all integrations show up on single integration search page but with couple flags.
All HACS integrations has its own label e.g. just HACS icon on the right upper corner or perhaps change color of integration title to HACS background.
When installing ANY new HACS integration, user will be prompted THIS IS unofficial integration. Are you sure you want to proceed?
HACS does more than integrations - it also does cards, themes, appdaemon automations and probably some stuff I have forgotten, so it is not as simple as you describe.
Also, it is itself a custom component, so I am not sure how you think it could get built in except for being manually added.
Lastly, it is super simple to install, I am not sure how it could be simpler.
True. HACS has additional piece and I have not tested those so those pieces perhaps may not necessary completely integrates/unifies.
As far as HACS installation, I believe the documentation is great and simply following step by step got me going. However, I do not believe it is general public user level of simplicity.
This may to be the best analogy but we can go back in time before plug and play drivers. We can insert CD and follow step by step menu to get Printer driver install. Very simple, but there are still many felt cumbersome. Now with plug and play, I think we all agree it just takes away unnecessary steps whether one feels easy or not.
This is totally my personal view. As I see Home Assistant has evolved significantly on UI side since couple years ago I tried, I am just hoping the trend continues and eventually make basic setups as simple almost plug and play. Then user spend majority of time actually creating automation.
Or how about, just have a check box and check it on UI, and run the copy and paste behind the scene?
I know my colleague who likes to search his local literature library using Mac Terminal, and I can see he can do that much faster than me clicking Tag > Folder. But which one is more visually appealing and have wider supporting audience?
User Presentation is surprisingly important part of product. I no longer work as programmer. But when I used to, I felt everything was about my background code for efficiency and cleanliness of the code. However, I had to admit that my HTML looked ugly when compared to graphic designer person produced version even though it did exactly the same thing…
Given that there many instances of people who believe anything installed via HACS is then supported by the HACS developer, I doubt there will be a push to have it as part of the core installation.
Honestly though I consider myself tech enthusiast/hobbyist and when needs to I eventually figure out with lots of googling and reading some references.
The main thing is CLI and how many extra steps one needs to do to install HACS.
After installing HA OS, one need to SSH into it or go to supervisor and install Terminal & SSH, and use command line there. From a brand new Home Assistant user perspective (at least haven’t used for two years), I had to first find HACS existence then create Github account and generate token.
Now replace this with you go to integration page, click check box. Even if I know how to install HACS via shell command, I’d still choose check box.
Actually SSH is the first thing you should install. The average user doesn’t need HACS. IMHO the average new user should first play with their system and get to know it, beofre they install custom components.
Don’t get me wrong, a button as you describe would be great, but given the dichotomy between official and unofficial, I don’t think you’ll get support for installing HACS into the official HA. Particularly when it has easy to follow instructions.
Even without copy and paste, how difficult is it to type a few characters. 44 is my count. Shorter than a post asking how to install it.
The developer has also been quite up front about not even considering adding it as an official integration. By the time you start exploring custom anything you should be comfortable with Home Assistant and troubleshooting it.
Enough people get into trouble with custom components (and other things) as it is, making it easier for people to break their install, before they have the capability to fix it, would be foolish. Even worse, many of those people will never get around to sorting out actual backups, so when they blow it up, they can’t even recover and have to start again.
Personally I think it’s a good thing to require some degree of technical ability to install hacs. It’s a powerful bit of software and if someone doesn’t know what they are doing they can make a big mess.
The forum is full of beginners who followed the instructions in a YouTube video to install hacs and some custom components before they learn the basics
Honestly, I figured out and loving HACs. But if one can set it up or not to me is a bit different from WHETHER one should be doing. Analogy here to me (maybe telling my age) is whether manually code HTML to create a webpage/blog OR just use UI. There were time HTML GUI was very limited in capability so certain thing I were forced to do manually. Could I do it? Sure. But it was much faster to use GUI. I’d rather be spending background program code writing than writing HTML.
So here, I feel like separation of technical ability to hinder some from installing HACS may not be the best interest. You can always warn users the consequence and user can proceed and take the risk. It even saves those of you who are already familiar with the steps.
Having said all this, I know nobody on this forum liked the idea so clearly I am the minority perhaps the only one here.
