Quick Home Assistant Shortcuts for Android

This week’s post is going to be a little shorter than normal, since I’ve been working on projects which aren’t ready to share yet. However, I did want to share a quick, but useful approach to controlling smart devices directly from the home screen of your Android device via some Android shortcuts and Home Assistant.

home assistant android shortcut
The home screen housing my HASS shortcuts

Let’s Get Started

The app I’m using to do this is called HTTP Shortcuts. It’s both free (as in beer) and Open Source. You could accomplish the same thing with Tasker and even though I also use Tasker, I still use this app. This is because it’s just a nice simple app that does one thing well. You can also execute these shortcuts from within Tasker if you would like.

home assistant android shortcut
Our HTTP Shortcuts variables

Before we create a shortcut, we’re going to add a couple of variables to make life a bit easier when creating multiple shortcuts. To do this press the {} icon in the top left corner. We are going to add two variables, one for the the HASS server name and another for the authentication token.

The first of these is easy, simply add a new variable with the plus icon and enter the key as ha_server. Leave the type as constant and add the hostname of your HASS server as the value. Make sure to not include the URL scheme here (http:// or https://) since this appears to throw off the regex validation when creating the shortcut.

For the second variable follow the same process, however you’ll want to insert the value of the long lived access token you get from your Home Assistant user’s profile page in the value field.

Creating Shortcuts

With that bit of prep done we can navigate back to the main page. Here we will add a new shortcut by again clicking the plus icon. First give your shortcut a name and description. These are only for your own use. You might also want to choose an icon at this point.

Next, hit the ‘Basic Request Settings’ item to and set the method to POST. In the URL field we enter the value:

https://{ha_server}/api/services/[domain]/[service]

Here you’ll replace [domain] with the entity type e.g. switch and [service] with the service name, e.g. turn_on. I find that using the toggle service is the most useful for these shortcuts, since you are usually using them in visual range of the device and it basically gives you two shortcuts in one.

The {ha_server} notation should be left as it is. This is using the variable we created earlier. Variables can actually be easily inserted with the {} button so there is no need to type it. You’ll also want to adjust my example above if you are using plain HTTP rather than HTTPS.

Adding Headers

The next stage of this is to add a custom header to our request. This is the Authorization header which has the value Bearer {ha_auth_token}. You’ll see here that we use the other of our variables to include the authentication token.

home assistant android shortcut
Our HTTP Header

Request Body

Finally we come to the request body. Here we set the request body type to ‘Custom Text’. The content type field here should again be set to application/json and the value should be the JSON to pass to the service. In the simple case this would just contain the entity ID you want to operate on, e.g {"entity_id": "switch.myswitch"}. Of course this might contain more data depending on the service you are calling. The data is exactly the same as that passed to the services developer tool in HASS, so you can test your calls there and then copy the data over.

home assistant android shortcut
Our finished shortcut

Final Steps

Once you’ve finished you can add the shortcut to the home screen via the long press menu on the main listing page. You can also export a copy of all your shortcuts via the settings page for use on another device. I don’t think this exports the values of your variables unless you checked the ‘Allow Share…’ advanced setting for the variable itself. This is most likely a good thing, since you’re going to want to use a different authentication token on each device.

I hope you’ve found this useful. I use these shortcuts every day and find them invaluable. The app has quite a bit more functionality which I haven’t covered here, including cURL import/export and processing of responses using Javascript.

For my regular readers, I apologise for the shorter post. It’s going to be a busy month coming up, but hopefully I’ll be back to my usual schedule soon. Thanks for sticking with me!

7 thoughts on “Quick Home Assistant Shortcuts for Android

  1. dobli says:

    Hey I have spoted your blog from the reddit post concerning this blog entry here. First a compliment, very well written and intresting articles. I’ve seen you’re also using docker and traefik in your setups.
    Now a question a bit of topic:
    Is there any chance you also have added or tried a central authentication setup for traefik? I started to tinker with vouch-proxy¹ as it supports Home Assistants auth api (which is based on IndieAuth, essentially a cut down Oauth server) as a backend. I did sort out a small bug regarding the HA integration (see pull requests), but did not get it to work with traefik yet. The idea was to have all services regarding the smart home (nodered, mopidy, etc) be secured by the auth mechanism of Home Assistant and as such also leveraging it’s user management.
    Do you have any experience regarding this or can recommend an Oauth server that’s easy to setup/integrate in a docker/traefik environment?

    Regards

    ¹ https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy

  2. Hi dobli,

    Thanks for the feedback about the blog. I’m glad you like it and found it useful.

    I haven’t tried any form of central authentication setup (for Traefik or otherwise). I had a quick look at the vouch-proxy page and it appears to be specifically for nginx, which might explain why you are having trouble getting it to work with Traefik. Sorry I can’t be of more help.

  3. dobli says:

    Hi Rob,

    Thanks for the reply and trying it out.
    Yes it was created with nginx in mind and instructions are tailored for it. But traefik supports the use case with Forward Auth and yesterday I got it to work partly.
    I can input the login redirect URL manually and it will lead me to the login page and forward me to nodered after the login. So the authentication flow seems to work, whats missing now is only the redirect to the login page when I try to access nodered without authentication (so redirecting HTTP status 401). Anyway thanks again.

    Regards

  4. maurizio says:

    I followed your guide carefully but got “name shortcuts”: Chain validation failed
    what is the cause of this error?

  5. I’ve never seen that error, but it looks like something to do with the TLS settings. Are you using a self signed certificate on your HASS install? If so you can try turning off TLS validation under “Advanced Technical Settings”->”Accept and certificate”. It’s probably worth getting a real cert via Let’s Encrypt so that this isn’t necessary.

  6. Hi Rob,

    Thanks for the nice and detailed article. I’m the creator of the HTTP Shortcuts app and wanted to let you know that I’m including a link to this page on the official website as an example of how to use my app. You’ll find it here: https://http-shortcuts.rmy.ch/examples

    Also, just a small correction of your article: When using the Export feature of the app, variables are exported along as well. The “Allow Share…” checkbox is for something else, and a good insight that I should improve the wording and documentation there.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *