2021.6: A little bit of everything

A little bit of everything. That is probably the best way to describe this
release. It is a packed release, with a lot of small new features everywhere!

Sonos got quite a bit of love, Hue now supports push updates, the UI has
a lot of usability tweaks, MQTT added quite a few attributes, themes can now
support modes… seriously, I can go on forever with this list.

So, no new big features (something might be cooking for the next release…),
but a nice release that has something for everybody. Definitely
worth scanning the all changes section for your favorite integrations.

../Frenck

Support for custom Dark mode themes

Previously, all themes automatically used our light theme as the base to build
on. As of today, themes can be based on our default dark theme as well!

Not only that, @spacegaier added support for themes that can support
both a Dark & Light mode in a single theme! This allows Home Assistant to
select the dark or light mode of your custom theme automatically.

Screenshot of a custom theme supporting both light & dark mode.

If you are a theme developer, you can find more information on how this works
in the frontend documentation.

Oh, and of course, all your existing themes will still just work as before.

Collapsed attributes

Some entities provide quite a few attributes and those show up in the user
interface. Most of the time, you don’t need to those and often
contain technical data that only confuse or clutter.

To unclutter the more information entity dialog from these attributes a bit,
the attributes will now show up collapsed into a bar and can be revealed with
a click.

Screen recording of the collapsible entity attributes.

Time format settings

A couple of releases back, we added the possibility to select the number format
that Home Assistant uses when showing numbers. Awesome! But… what about
the formatting of time?

That question was raised a lot that release and many of you requested the same
feature for time formatting, for example, if one prefers a 24-hour format.

Well, you can thank @spacegaier for this one:

Screenshot of new time format setting.

You can find this new setting in your user profile.

Disable polling updates on any integration

One returning feature request, for many integrations, is adding controls for
tuning the polling interval an integration uses.

For example, if an integration has an API that needs to be paid for and you
don’t need too many updates, it can be a cost saver to use a slower polling
interval.

Another often requested example is things like battery-powered devices, or maybe
a device you only want to poll during the day and not during the night.

This release, we add support for disabling polling on every integration via
the integration system options; for ALL integrations.

Screenshot of the system options of an integration showing the disable polling option.

Wait? Disable polling?! Yes 🙂

So, there are many different requests on, for example, changing polling rates
(also known as scan interval), but also requests for polling on a schedule, or,
only based on other input (e.g., triggered by a motion sensor).

Therefore, we decided to provide the maximum flexibility for any use case you
can come up with. Disabling polling makes Home Assistant stop polling
automatically. However, you can use the
homeassistant.update_entity
service on those entities to trigger a poll for information.

This means, once you’ve disabled polling for an integration, you can create
automations and completely customize when you poll that integration from that
point on. All based on your own schedule, conditions or triggers.

Network integration

This release adds a new Network integration, created by @bdraco, to help
other Home Assistant integrations to get the right information about
your network.

It also provides you a single place to tell Home Assistant about your network.
It is an advanced feature and thus will only show up if you have advanced mode
enabled on your user profile.

You probably don’t need to change these settings, by default, Home Assistant
will auto-detect the right configuration. However, if you have a more complex
network configuration, with multiple network adapters or VLANs, you can now
select the interface Home Assistant integrations should use.

Screenshot of new Home Assistant Network settings in the general configuration.

Please note that this is a new feature that needs to be implemented/used
by other integrations. At this point, not all integrations will honor these
settings yet.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other
noteworthy changes this release:

• The Modbus has been receiving lots and lots of love from @janiversen,
  a big shout out to him for continuously improving it for the past weeks!
• The Hue integration now supports push updates! Blazing fast response times
  if you are using that platform.
• @balloob and @bdraco have been working on replacing date/time/timezone
  handling in Home Assistant. Right on time.
• All services, for all integrations, now have updated information for their
  service calls. This means all service calls now have a nice new UI.
  Amazing job @tkdrob!
• Support for the new colors modes is slowly expanding. This release
  Elgato, Z-Wave JS, KNX and MQTT have added support.
• Sonos got some love from @mountainsandcode, @AaronDavidSchneider and
  @jjlawren. A lot of fixes and improvements, but also added support for
  controlling the state of the hardware buttons and controlling your Sonos
  alarms!
• The developer state tools, now shows the
  name of the entity additional to the entity ID. Searching/filtering the list
  now supports wildcards (*). Thanks, @spacegaier!
• Thanks to @PeteBa, there is now a recorder.purge_entities service that
  allows you to purge data from the recorder database for specified entities.
• Watson TTS has added a bunch of new voices to choose from, thanks @demikl!
• Ding dong! @bdraco added support for doorbell buttons to the HomeKit
  Controller integration.
• BMW Connected Drive, now provides a bunch of sensors about your last trip.
  Thanks, @EddyK69!
• @emericklaw added a new feature that allows you to duplicate a scene!
• My Home Assistant now supports linking to
  the Ingress interface of an add-on!
• Light templates now have support for effects, transitions and a bunch
  more properties, thanks to @jacekpaszkowski!
• VeSync now supports Etekcity light bulbs, thanks @sdrapha.
• The universal media player now supports overriding a lot of commands! Thanks
  for adding that @Drafteed!
• @mdz continues expanding the SmartTub integration adding service to
  change filtration settings and snoozing reminders.
• The Elgato integration now supports the new Elgato LED strips.
• If you are into Oracle DB, @mciupak made sure our recorder can now use that.
• Z-Wave JS integration now shows progress when adding or re-interviewing a
  device. Thanks, @cgarwood!
• The Nexia integration now also supports controlling American Standard
  thermostat, added by @bdraco.
• @Drafteed added support for changing channels on your LG NetCast TV, thanks!
• @mib1185 ensured that the UX for counters and number helpers look nice!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations this release:

• Bosch Smart Home Controller, added by @tschamm
• Garages Amsterdam, added by @klaasnicolaas
• Kraken, added by @eifinger
• Meteoclimatic, added by @adrianmo
• Nettigo Air Monitor, added by @bieniu
• Network configuration, added by @bdraco
• SIA Alarm Systems, added by @eavanvalkenburg
• Syncthing, added by @zhulik
• System Bridge, added by @timmo001
• Wallbox, added by @hesselonline

New Platforms

The following integration got support for a new platform:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat.

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Breaking Changes

This release has an unusual amount of breaking changes to report. Don’t worry,
most won’t have a noticeable impact and are part of a cleanup effort.
However, we do want to report them all, just to be complete and transparent.

Integrations that removed deprecated YAML import

The following integrations had deprecated their YAML import support in the past,
and now removed it. Your YAML configuration has been imported into the UI
configuration in previous releases.

If you still have one of the following integrations configured in your YAML
configuration, you can now safely remove it from your YAML configuration.

Integrations that deprecated YAML import

The following integrations now deprecated importing YAML configuration into
the UI. Your YAML configuration already has been imported into the UI and the
YAML configuration can be safely removed.

The import functionality for these integrations will be removed in
Home Assistant Core 2021.8. Using YAML configurations for these integrations
will write a deprecation warning in the Home Assistant log files during this
deprecation period.

Other breaking changes

Below is a listing of the other breaking change for this release, per subject or
integration. Click on one of those to read more about the breaking change
for that specific item.