explaingit

home-assistant/home-assistant.io

9,228HTMLAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

The source files for the Home Assistant documentation website, built with Jekyll and deployed via Netlify, for contributors who want to edit or improve the official smart home platform docs.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((HA Docs Site))
    What it does
      Jekyll static site
      Official HA docs
      Netlify deployment
    Environments
      Production site
      Beta release preview
      Per-PR previews
    Tech stack
      Jekyll
      Ruby Bundler
      Netlify
    Use cases
      Fix doc errors
      Add integration guides
      Write automation examples
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Run the documentation site locally to preview your edits before submitting a pull request.

USE CASE 2

Fix errors or add missing information in the Home Assistant docs by editing Jekyll source files.

USE CASE 3

Contribute a new integration guide or automation example to the official documentation.

Tech stack

HTMLJekyllRubyNetlify

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires Ruby and Bundler, changelog blog posts significantly slow down local builds, use the helper command to move them out.

Website content is under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0, you can share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the source and share alike.

In plain English

This repository contains the source files for the Home Assistant user documentation website at home-assistant.io. Home Assistant is a widely used open-source smart home automation platform that lets people control and automate connected devices. This repo is not the platform itself, it is strictly the website and documentation. The site is built with Jekyll, a tool that converts text and template files into a static HTML website. It is deployed automatically through Netlify. Three environments exist: production (the main live site), a beta version tracking release candidates, and a development version showing upcoming changes. Netlify also creates a preview build for each pull request, linked in the first PR comment, so contributors can inspect their changes before they are merged. The README is brief and focused on contributors rather than end users. It explains how to run a local copy of the site for editing, using a Ruby tool called Bundler. Because every Home Assistant release ships a detailed changelog and those posts can slow down site generation significantly, there is a helper command to temporarily move blog posts out of the build while you work on something else, and another to put them back. Contributions to the documentation go through standard GitHub pull requests. The developer documentation for Home Assistant explains the conventions and formatting rules contributors are expected to follow. The website content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0. The project is part of the Open Home Foundation.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I set up the home-assistant.io repository locally with Ruby and Bundler to preview documentation changes?
Prompt 2
What Jekyll front matter fields do I need to add a new integration page to the Home Assistant docs?
Prompt 3
Show me how to use the blog-post move command to speed up local builds when I'm only editing non-blog pages.
Prompt 4
Write a Home Assistant documentation page explaining how to set up a motion-triggered light automation using YAML.
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