The frontend of Home Assistant is served with the help of a local web server. If you have customized your installation you already use this functionality. The content of your folder www in your Home Assistant configuration directory (.homeassistant) is available under /local (eg. http://localhost:8123/local for an index.html file).
But there is more you can do! You can not only host images for customization there but HTML files or even web applications including CSS and Javascript.
In the past the buzz word “Smart mirror” was used a couple of times in our chatroom and even made it into the issue tracker. The existing solutions (Smart mirror, MagicMirror, and HomeMirror) seems to be overkill if you already have Home Assistant running somewhere in your house or apartment. Why not simple display a web page served by Home Assistant on the tablet? No app and no Raspberry Pi running in the background.
There are plenty of ways to achieve this…RESTful API, Python API, or one of the history components. If it is to be a web page I’m using the MQTT Eventstream component and mqttws31.js.
The HBMQTT broker provides websockets support for MQTT and mqttws31.js included in web page gives you access to the MQTT messages. It’s a matter of minutes. OK, it took a little longer because I’m not a Javascript guy to create the software part that will show details about your environment. The source is available at https://github.com/fabaff/home-assistant-display and the screenshot above shows the result. I guess that every person who is familiar with Javascript would be able to reduce the amount of code and to make it more flexible. Well, it’s only a prototype and showcase to include an image in this blog post.
I hope that this little article could give you an idea of extending Home Assistant in an unconventional way.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://home-assistant.io/blog/2016/04/07/static-website/