WTH: are alerts not configurable through the UI?

I see this has come up in a couple of previous years and it’s still true: why isn’t the alert integration UI-configurable? It’s a very useful piece of functionality that I use over a dozen of, at least, and all of them have to be hand-written in YAML.

And to add insult to injury, alerts don’t even show up as a reloading option under “Developer tools”.

(Yes, I could put the equivalent functionality into every one of those cases myself, either directly or through a blueprint, but seriously. How inelegant that would be!)

It seems pretty unlikely that any big changes will be made to Alerts until after the switch to entity-based notifications is completed, if ever. Once that change is made, the functionality of Alerts will be reproducible as an automation blueprint, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Alerts get phased out.

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Is that something the devs have committed to? Because that strikes me as an exquisitely horrible way to implement the functionality of alerts.

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I am not aware of a definitive plan regarding the Alert integration after the move to entity-based notifications, but comments of that nature have been made.

https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/discussions/1155#discussioncomment-10916591

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/128637#discussion_r1806108186

TLDR; The Alert integration will not be updated anytime soon and PRs are not currently being accepted for it.

Thanks for the information.

Just bringing this forward from 2024. I use alerts and I think they are a very useful part of Home Assistant but they are annoying to use as they are YAML only and you need to restart home assistant every time you adjust anything. Can these either be setup via the UI, or just officially depreciate these and help us move them to be automations.

I just saw this thread. To chime in, I’ve been working on Alert2 and hope to support UI config, though haven’t gotten there yet. There’s a lengthy thread tracking Alert2 development at:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/alert2-a-new-alerting-component/654597

To be clear, at present, it’s not part of core HA and I haven’t been in communication that I know of with core HA people (though I would love to).

-Josh