2023.6: Network storage, favorite light colors, new integrations dashboard

Home Assistant Core 2023.6! 🎉

Get ready for a classic, old-fashioned, jam-packed release! 🤯

I am excited about so many things being shipped in this release that it is
hard to pick a favorite 😅 This release has it all.

Being able to directly use and back up my Home Assistant configuration to my
network storage is absolutely incredible! But I also really enjoy the new and
clean integrations dashboard and pages.

The feature that greatly improved the Home Approval Factor in my household
is definitely the addition of the new favorite colors in the light dialogs 🎨

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Don’t forget to join our release party live stream on YouTube
7 June 2023, at 12:00 PDT / 21:00 CEST!

Connect and use your existing network storage

Do you have a network storage in your home? Like a QNAP or Synology NAS?
This release adds the ability to add and use that storage with Home Assistant!

This long and highly requested feature is now available when running the
Home Assistant Operating System. In the Settings > System > Storage
menu, you can now find a whole new set of controls to connect to your storage
and use it to, for example, use your network share as a media source
in Home Assistant.

Even better: You can use it as a target for your backups so that when
Home Assistant creates a backup for you, it will store it directly on
your network storage.

Multiple network storages are also supported; if you like, you can
easily add more.

Integrations dashboard & pages

The integrations dashboard has gotten a major overhaul!

There have been quite some usability issues with the previous version of the
integration dashboard. For example, if you use ESPHome with many devices,
you are undoubtedly familiar with the annoying scrolling in that little card. Or,
big error messages stretching those cards out, messing up the whole page.

This release brings in a whole new integrations dashboard that addresses many
of these issues, aiming to provide a cleaner and more consistent experience.

Device based integrations, like ESPHome, are combined: no more scrolling.
A failing integration no longer stretches the layout or makes the
layout “jump” during retries. Custom integrations and integrations relying
on the cloud are now more visibly marked.

Selecting the cog icon on the integration card will bring you to a brand new
integrations page, showing all information about the integration:

In the above example, the ESPHome integration page shows all devices
this integration has. All the information and options, previously squashed into
the integration dashboard, are now available here.

These brand new integration pages are helpful in other places in Home Assistant.
For example, the device pages can now link back directly to the integration
that provided it.

Light entity dialog improvements: favorite colors

Recently we introduced new controls in the light entity dialog, and this release
iterates on the design by adding the current brightness, new controls,
and adding favorite colors! 🎨

Each light (or light group) has its own set of colors. These colors can
be added, changed, removed, and reorganized using drag-and-drop. To enter
edit mode, select and hold one of the colors:

Added to the entity dialog: last changed

By popular request, the information on when an entity was last changed has
been added back to the new entity information dialogs.

Not only that, @piitaya added a very nice easter egg! You can click on it
to toggle between the relative and absolute format!

Related information

Which automation is using that blueprint? Well, Home Assistant can now tell you
that! On the Settings > Automations & Scenes > Blueprints
page, select the three dotted menu on any blueprint to discover which
automations are using that blueprint.

Not only that, if you accidentally try to remove a blueprint that is still in use,
Home Assistant will stop you from removing it and tell you which automations
still rely on it.

Hold on; there is more related! The related items in the entity information
dialog were improved as well. The old list of links is gone, and it now shows
a way more modern view of all related items for an entity:

Notice how it nicely links back to the new integration page here too!

Copy ’n paste support in the automation editor

An amazing contribution by @karwosts in this release that adds cut, copy
& paste capabilities to the automation and script editors!

You can now copy and paste any trigger, condition, and action into different
places of your automation and even paste it into a different automation
altogether!

Python 3.11 and significant performance upgrades

This release ships running on Python 3.11! In case you are wondering, what is
that? Well, Python is the language the Core of Home Assistant is written in.

Why it matters? It is seriously faster! 🚀

If you run the Home Assistant Operating System or are using the Home Assistant
Container installation type: You won’t have to do anything as we handle the
upgrade to Python 3.11 for you.

And that is not all in terms of performance. We’ve also upgraded internal parts,
including a newer SQLite version that should be faster. Oh! And, of course,
@bdraco has been all over the place to optimize a lot (a lot lot).

This release can be expected to be a lot faster (or less consuming) of resources
at runtime.

Matter 1.1

The Matter implementation within Home Assistant is now based on the freshly
released 1.1 version of the Matter standard. This brings a ton of stability
fixes and improvements, but unfortunately, no new features.

Thanks to @Diegorro98, we do now have support for tilt covers! Besides that,
this Home Assistant release ships with several generic bugfixes and
optimizations; we’ve managed to squeeze out some additional performance to
make state updates for your Matter devices lightning-fast 🚀

All these stability improvements to both the Matter stack and our
implementation did not go unnoticed:

Z-Wave updates

There has been quite a bit of progress on Z-Wave in Home Assistant.

Thanks to @raman325, the integration reached platinum level 🏆 on our
quality scale. This means the integration now does things right according
to best practices which should mean a better user experience in general.

Have you ever turned on a Z-Wave light from the Home Assistant UI just to see
the toggle going off again after a couple of seconds, then after some more
seconds seeing it going back to on? This long-standing issue (that even got the
nickname flip/flop) for certain devices, that are slow to respond to their
state has finally been addressed.

For those of you that like to automate everything, you can now automate not
only the Z-Wave device state but also the device configuration. We added device
configuration parameter entities so that almost every Z-Wave device setting
is now available as an entity.

Not stopping there, we also added entities for device connection statistics,
which you can use to, for example, create a notification if a device generates
more than a certain amount of dropped messages. If you want to track
a misbehaving device, you can enable these sensors to view the history
of the connection performance.

In the background, @AlCalzone is working tirelessly on the Z-Wave JS driver,
which is the foundation of our Z-Wave integration. Among other things, some
devices are now faster to interview during addition, and more devices
can be configured.

New entities! Date, time, date/time

We welcome three new entity types in this release:
date, time & datetime.

These entities allow integrations to provide date, time, or date/time input
controls from the UI. They are very similar to the input datetime
helper but are available for use by integrations.

How the new time, date, and date/time entities will look like on your dashboards.

They are so new that no integrations are using them yet, but you can expect
to see usage in (custom) integrations of these soon!

Thanks for creating those @raman325!

Other noteworthy changes

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

• When using services in the UI (like in the automation editor), only options
  and settings available to the selected target devices & entities will be shown.
  This makes the UI much cleaner! Thanks, @emontnemery and @bramkragten!
• The Roborock integration (introduced in the previous release) received much
  love and now provides a wide range of new entities. Thanks @Lash-L!
• The Android TV Remote integration now provides a media player entity too!
  Nice, @Drafteed!
• KNX now provides its own panel, allowing you to upload your KNX
  project file, and offers a group monitor for live bus diagnostics.
  Information from the project is also used for device triggers.
  Amazing @marvin-w and @farmio!
• @bdraco added the option to disable Webhooks for ONVIF in case your
  camera isn’t fully following specifications.
• The variables action is now also available in the automation and script
  editors in the UI. Thanks, @piitaya
• The add-on dashboard now has a search bar. Helpful, @bramkragten!
• The Samsung TV now has a remote entity, allowing you to send remote key
  presses directly to your TV! Thanks @peitschie!
• The States in the developer tools now
  uses the entity ID in the entity ID picker. Thanks, @bramkragten!
• @gjohansson-ST added a service to change a running timer helper, @frenck
  did something similar and added a service to set the value of a counter helper.
• The AccuWeather integration now provides sensors for the weather condition
  and solar irradiance values. Thanks, @bieniu
• You can now update your QNAP QSW directly from Home Assistant. Nice @Noltari!
• The BMW Connected Drive now allows you to toggle climate on/off and new
  entities related to the charging of your car. Thanks, @rikroe and @cpoulsen!

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

• Airzone Cloud, added by @Noltari
  Climate control for your Aidoo, Easyzone, or Flexa air conditioners.
• Date, Time, and Date/Time, added by @raman325
  New entity types that allow integrations to provide date/time controls.
• Electra Smart, added by @jafar-atili
  Control your Electra Air air conditioner from Home Assistant.
• Google Generative AI Conversation, added by @tronikos
  A conversation agent powered by Google Generative AI.
• JVC Projector, added by @SteveEasley
  You can now automate your network controllable JVC Projector.
• YouTube, added by @joostlek
  Add your favorite YouTube channels as sensors.

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations
are stubs that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with
findability. This one is new:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

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

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing
to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be
at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker,
to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more
places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter
to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and
other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Breaking Changes

# Example configuration.yaml entry
binary_sensor:
  - platform: command_line
    command: "cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"

# Example configuration.yaml entry
command_line:
  - binary_sensor:
      command: "cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking
changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our
developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

Farewell to the following

The following integrations are also no longer available as of this release:

• Goalfeed has been removed. Their service has been discontinued.
  (@thecode – #94129)

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of
all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2023.6