Home Assistant Assistant

GitHub Copilot workspace for building automations, scripts, and configurations on your existing Home Assistant installation. Not for Home Assistant core development.

The agent fetches your live entities via MCP and uses official documentation with code examples to provide accurate, hallucination-free guidance.

Setup

Prerequisites

• VS Code with GitHub Copilot
• Home Assistant instance with API access
• MCP Server for Home Assistant add-on installed
• Long-lived access token
• SSH access to Home Assistant with a host alias homeassistant configured in ~/.ssh/config (passwordless login)

Home Assistant MCP Server Setup

1. Install the MCP Server add-on in Home Assistant:

   • Go to Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store
   • Add repository: https://github.com/pdelfino/mcp-server-homeassistant
   • Install MCP Server for Home Assistant
   • Start the add-on

2. Generate a long-lived access token:

   • Go to Profile → Security → Long-lived access tokens
   • Click Create Token and copy it

Installation

git clone https://github.com/calexandre/homeassistant-assistant.git
code homeassistant-assistant

VS Code will prompt for:

• Host: Your Home Assistant URL without https:// (e.g., homeassistant.local:8123)
• Bearer token: The long-lived access token you created

The MCP configuration is in .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "homeassistant": {
      "url": "https://${input:ha_host}/mcp_server/sse",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ${input:ha_bearer_token}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Fetching Home Assistant Configs

Automations, scenes, scripts, configuration.yaml, and logs are not exposed by the MCP server. The following script assumes your homeassistant instance is accessible via SSH on host homeassistant.

Use the fetch script to download them via SSH:

scripts/fetch-ha-data.sh

Config files and logs are saved to ha-data/ (gitignored). The script assumes the standard HAOS config path (/config). To override:

scripts/fetch-ha-data.sh /custom/config/path

Usage

1. Open GitHub Copilot chat
2. Select Home Assistant agent
3. Ask questions like:
   • "Show me all my light entities"
   • "Create an automation to turn on lights at sunset"
   • "Debug why my motion sensor automation isn't triggering"

Home Assistant Agent

The homeassistant.agent.md provides expert assistance for building automations and configurations:

• Live entity discovery: Fetches real-time device and entity states before providing suggestions
• Documentation-first: Searches official HA docs and retrieves working examples before responding—avoids hallucinating syntax or deprecated patterns
• Source citations: Links to exact documentation sections used
• Modern syntax: Uses current patterns (2024.8+ action format)

Examples:

> What's the status of all my climate devices?

> Create a motion-activated light automation for the living room

> Help me debug this template: {{ states('sensor.temperature') | float }}

Release Notes Analyzer

The ha-release-notes.prompt.md generates personalized release summaries based on your setup:

Usage:

/ha-release-notes

Output includes:

• Feature highlights relevant to your devices
• New integrations matching your setup
• Improvements to integrations you use
• Breaking changes impact assessment
• Update recommendation

Summaries are saved to ha-release-notes/ha-release-[VERSION].md.

Project Structure

.github/
├── agents/          # Copilot agents
├── instructions/    # Workflow guidance
└── prompts/         # Reusable prompts
.vscode/
└── mcp.json         # MCP server config
ha-release-notes/    # Generated release summaries

Resources

• Home Assistant Docs
• GitHub Copilot
• Model Context Protocol

Troubleshooting

Cannot connect to MCP server:

1. Verify the MCP Server add-on is running in Home Assistant
2. Test the endpoint: curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" https://your-ha-url/mcp_server/sse
3. Check that your token has the required permissions