I just wanted to share a basic recipe for when you want a trigger to work at most once every X minutes (or whatever time is needed), for instance to limit notification spam.
The idea is simple: in the action part, just disable the automation from itself, do your things, add a delay as needed and finally enable the automation again.
automation:
- alias: Test
trigger:
# Your trigger
- platform: state
entity_id: input_boolean.testbool
to: 'on'
action:
# Disable this automation
- service: automation.turn_off
entity_id: automation.test
# Do stuff
- service: homeassistant.toggle
entity_id: switch.some_switch
# Wait some time and turn the automation back on
- delay:
minutes: 1
- service: automation.turn_on
entity_id: automation.test
Nothing strange once you know about it, but that you can disable and enable the automation from within itself might feel counter-intuitive, so I thought I’d share this.
So, to make sure I’m clear: when you turn off an automation, that just prevents it from triggering again, but let’s the instance that’s already running complete it’s action?
This can cause an integrity issue if you Home Assistant is shut down during your delay. Then on the next start, your automation will be permanently off.
Better to use a condition like this:
condition:
- condition: template # only notify once every hour at most
value_template: "{{ ( as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(state_attr('automation.notify_me', 'last_triggered')) |int(0) ) > 3600 }}"
With the new update, this is now done by setting the automation mode to single (already the default) and adding a delay to the end of however long you want minimum between the automation triggers.
Not working that way for me. Maybe updates since your post have changed the behaviour?
My experience is that after the service automation turn off, nothing else executes and the automation turn on never happens after the delay.
