WTH Allow custom sidebar items

Month of "What the heck?!"
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Original title: WTH Automations is not in sidebar

I just started using Home Assistant last month.

Automations are the “Bread & Butter” of Home Assistant. A link to the main page should be in the sidebar, at the top honestly. As a new user, I don’t really use most of the links on the sidebar. I also think that “Scenes” and “Devices & services” should be on the sidebar as well as those seem to be my other most used pages.

I am not sure what analytics that are collected, but an interesting idea could be to show the pages ordered by most commonly used if that information is available.

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Home Assistant is for users, not for people who is building automations.
That is why all settings (which include automations, scenes etc) are inside a dedicated menu entry.

1 Like
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There’s a cookbook post on this:

How to add custom buttons to the side toolbar

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@Ildar_Gabdullin I think the beauty of a home automation platform is encouraging people to make their own automations. I understand what you’re saying, for example if kids are at home, maybe you wouldn’t want them to make automations. But to me it seems the default functionality of home assistant would be the opposite, I’d expect HA to encourage all people living in a home to create their own automations. And of course, you’d want the ability to hide that from the sidebar, and prevent certain users from modifying them.

@jackjourneyman I know it can be done, but after spending 5 minutes on it and the results from google not working because HA is changing fast, I thought it would be nice to suggest this as a default feature because I think it’s the right thing. That link you sent is include JS code and is not friendly to many people, HA should be for more than software engineers. FWIW, I am a software engineer for my full-time job. But I don’t want to have to copy/paste a JS file into some subdirectory in order to add one the most commonly used parts of HA to my sidebar.

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Yes it’s JavaScript, but what does that matter.
You just copy paste it and follow the guide.
Copy pasting is not engineering.

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Also it appears I have to restart home assistant every time I want to update a sidebar item… It’s not easy. I’m a professional software engineer and I’ve spent more than 15 minutes trying to get this to work. It’s not easy.

@jackjourneyman your link doesn’t work, I get an error than the custom panel doesn’t exist when I click on the sidebar. It shouldn’t be this hard to add “automations” to the sidebar.

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canvas (5)
canvas (5)563×2048 46.2 KB

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ingress:
  link_automation:
    work_mode: iframe
    ui_mode: replace
    title: Automation
    icon: mdi:robot
    url: /config/automation/dashboard

After you modify the Ingress configuration, you can go to developer-tools page and click INGRESS to reload without restarting HA.
You can also use this integration to add other services to your sidebar as ingress (to avoid iframe cors problem).

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This WTH might be a hair too specific, but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to want an easier path to customizing the sidebar. That seems like a very good WTH to me.

4 Likes
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Ahh, yes, I think framing it that way makes a lot of sense! Thanks @strato.

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If you can usually get stuff done in less than 15 minutes in your line of work, post your CV here.
Loads of companies would be willing to pay good money to a dev who can code their way out of an issue in under 15 minutes.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/-sam-bender-/