Welcome to my comprehensive guide on mastering
scripts in Home Assistant! Are you tired of repetitive tasks in your
smart home? With Home Assistant, you can take control
and automate your devices with ease using scripts. Let’s do this! Some of you asked me why you should use scripts
in Home Assistant because you think you can do everything with automations. Well, scripts are a powerful tool that allows
you to combine multiple actions into a single command. Imagine turning off all your lights, locking
your doors, and adjusting the thermostat with just a tap. But I hear you thinking… I can do this with automations too… Yes, that’s true, but what if you have multiple
automations and they all contain the same task, like sending a message to your phone,
resetting some helper values, or turning on specific lights and switches at the same time? Let’s say, you want to send a message to
your phone when an automation gets triggered. For instance, you get a message as soon as
mail has been delivered to your letterbox. By the way, I made a video about that scenario
a while ago, so if you want to make that, check out this video. Anyway, you want to send a message to your
phone when a certain event occurs. You can do that in an automation and that
will definitely work. Now, let’s say you have 20 automations that
send messages to your phone. If you get a new phone, you have to go through
all these automations to let them point to your new phone. If you send a message using a script, you
can call that single script in all your 20 automations and you only have to point that
one script to your new phone. This is just a simple example, but I hope
you get the idea that a script can be a great solution if you have repetitive tasks that
you want to perform in multiple automations. The best part is that you can send parameters
to scripts so that your scripts can use these parameters in their actions. I will show you some examples from simple
to more advanced on how you can use scripts in Home Assistant. Let’s start with the simplest use case:
“Create a script that sends a fixed message to your phone”. Go to Home Assistant and go to Settings. Go to Automations & Scenes. Click the Scripts Tab. Click Add Script. Select Create New Script. Give your Script a Name, for instance, Send
Message To Phone. Click Add Action. Select Call Service. Select the notify service for your phone. You need to have the Home Assistant Companion
App installed on your phone to be able to use this service. Enter a message. Enter a title. The message and title will be fixed in this
use case. In the next use case, we will make these configurable. Click Save Script. Test your script by going to the three dots
in the upper right corner and selecting “Run Script”, The message and title should appear
on your phone now. Congratulations, you’ve created your first
script. This is quite a simple script and maybe not
so applicable for everyday use. You can call this script using an automation
or a button on your dashboard. It might come in handy if you want to send
a fixed message to your phone like “Beware, the windows are still open” when you leave
your house. So, for every message we need to create a
separate script and that’s, well, a bit inconvenient. It would be a lot more useful if we could
create a script that accepts the title and message as parameters. This way we can send several different messages
using only one script. So, our next use case is: “Create a script
that sends a custom message to your phone.” Let me show you how you can set this up. Open the script that we’ve just created. Click on the three dots in the upper right
corner. and select Add fields. A Fields section is now added to the script. Enter a name for the first field. In our case, that’s “title”. Enter a description. This description is visible in the automation
that calls this script. Toggle the required field so that the user
has to enter a title before he can save the automation that calls this script. Click Add Field. Enter a name for the second field. In our case, that’s “message”. Enter a description for the message field. and, toggle the required field again. We are now going to point to these fields
in the action of this script. Scroll down to the Sequence section. Click on the three dots next to the notify
service that we’ve created before. Select Edit in YAML. Replace the message with the following code:
message: "{{message}}" replace the title with the following code:
title: "{{title}}" click Save Script. The script is now created. To call this script, we need to create an
automation that sends the values for the title and message to this script. You can trigger this automation using various
states, like doors that are still open in your house, lights that are still on, the
washing machine that is ready, etcetera. If you want to know how to do this, you can
watch this video for example. For this tutorial, I’ve created a toggle
helper called dummy. Make sure you’ve created a toggle helper
with the name “Dummy” before you create the automation. As soon as I switch that helper, the automation
gets triggered. But, you can use your own triggers instead. Let’s set up the automation. Go to Settings -> Automations and Scenes. Click Create Automation. Select Create New Automation. First, define your trigger. Click Add Trigger. Select State. In my case, I select the dummy helper that
I’ve created for this tutorial. And, in the “to” field I select “On”. Now go to the Actions section. Click “Add Action”. Select Call Service. In the service field, select the service script.notify_send_message_to_phone. This is the script that we’ve just created. You’ll see the two fields that we’ve defined
in the script. Enter a title and a message. Click Save and give your automation a meaningful
name. Let’s test the automation and script by
flipping the Dummy helper. Go to Settings -> Devices and Services. Click the Helpers tab. I search for the dummy helper that I’ve
created before. Click on the Dummy helper and turn it on. The notification will now appear on your phone
and the title and message that you’ve entered in the automation will show. Now we know how we can utilize fields in scripts. This helps us to create flexible scripts that
can be used in various automations or other scripts. There is one more thing we can do and that
is use response variables in scripts. This is a more advanced feature of scripts. Scripts can be used to retrieve data from
sensors and manipulate this data using template code. The result of this template code can be used
in an automation that calls this script. Let me show you how you can do this with the
following example. The use case is: Send a custom weather condition
to my phone. It’s just a simple use case, but I hope
you will get an idea of how to use response variables. Let’s first create the script that gets
the weather condition and manipulates it. Go to Settings > Automations & Scenes. Click the Scripts tab. Click Add Script. Select Create New Script. Give your script a meaningful name. We only want this script to calculate something,
so we are going to add a stop action. This means that this script will stop immediately
when it is called. But, we will make sure this script will also
calculate our custom weather condition. Click Add Action and select Stop. Enter a reason for stopping. I will just enter “End” here. Now, enter the name of the response variable
that you want to use. This can be any name. It’s up to you what the variable name will
be. For our purpose, I will name it weather underscore
condition. Now we are going to add the YAML template
code that will generate our custom weather condition. Click on the three dots in the upper right
corner. And, select Edit in Yaml. We are going to add a variable. Start with adding a line called variables:
Then enter your variable name. This should be the exact same name as the
name that you used in the response_variable field. In our case, this is weather_condition followed
by a piping symbol. Next, we are going to create our template
that will generate the custom weather condition. First I create a variable temperature that
stores the temperature that is provided by the openweathermap integration. Then I am checking this temperature in a couple
of if statements. Based on the temperature I fill the variable
“conditions” with a value like “Cold”, “Chilly”, “Comfortable”, or “Warm”. This is just basic templating. If you’d like to know more about how to
create templates, then please watch this step-by-step tutorial where I explain how you can create
your own templates. You can find the link in the description of
the video. Finally, we are going to return the generated
value in this line. So, our response variable weather underscore
condition gets filled with an index called “value” that contains the custom weather
condition that is stored in the variable “condition”. The index name “value” is important to
remember, because we are going to use that in the automation that we are going to create
next. So, we created a script that generates a custom
weather condition and we still have the script that sends a custom message to our phone. We are going to use these two scripts in one
automation now to send the custom weather condition to our phone. Open the automation that we’ve created in
the previous use case. This was the automation called Notify: Send
a custom message to phone. Click Add Action. Select our script Weather: get custom weather
condition. Now enter a name for the response variable
that you will get from the script. This can be any name. You can use the same name as the one that
you’ve used in the script, but I am going to use the name “Result” here. What happens here is that the response variable
from the script that contains our custom weather condition will be stored in the response variable
with the name “Result” in my automation. Now move this action above the Notify action
by clicking on the three dots in the action section and clicking on Re-order. Drag and drop this action above the Notify
action. Now open the notify action. Change the title to a meaningful title. For instance Weather Condition. Change the message to a meaningful message
that also contains the response variable “value”. So, I start with the text “The weather is”
and then I am going to show the custom weather condition by pointing to the response variable
“result”. Within the “result” response variable
I am pointing to the index called “value”. Remember? We created the template in the custom weather
condition script and called the index “value”. This is where we use that index name “value”
again. It will be populated with the outcome of our
template. Click Save. Go back to your Dummy helper and turn the
helper on. The message on your phone will now show the
custom weather condition that you’ve created in your script using a template. I can imagine that this last example may make
you dizzy, but I still hope that you see how powerful this can be if you want to start
using scripts in Home Assistant. This is just a simple example, but there are
so many ideas to use this. I’m curious to see what ideas you can come
up with. Let me know your ideas in the comments. So, why waste time on manual tasks? Let Home Assistant’s scripts do the work
for you. Start automating and taking control of your
smart home today! Thanks for watching, and if my videos are
valuable to you, please consider sponsoring me just like these amazing people do. You can really help keep this channel alive! Thank you. And don’t forget to give this video a thumbs
up and subscribe to my channel for more tips and tricks on mastering Home Assistant. I will see you soon in my next video! Bye bye!
