Integration platforms

Home Assistant has various built-in integrations that abstract device types. There are lights, switches, covers, climate devices, and many more. Your integration provides entities to these by adding a platform for each entity type it supports.

To add a platform, create a file named after the entity type in your integration folder. To provide a light, add a light.py; to provide a sensor, add a sensor.py, and so on.

Each platform file implements an async_setup_entry function that creates the entities for a config entry. Your integration forwards its config entry to those platforms from its own async_setup_entry:

PLATFORMS = [Platform.LIGHT, Platform.SENSOR]


async def async_setup_entry(hass: HomeAssistant, entry: ConfigEntry) -> bool:
    """Set up the integration from a config entry."""
    await hass.config_entries.async_forward_entry_setups(entry, PLATFORMS)
    return True

See config entries for the full platform setup and unload flow. The detailed_hello_world_push example integration shows this in practice, forwarding to a sensor and a cover platform.

Interfacing with devices

One Home Assistant rule is that the integration should never interface directly with devices. Instead, it should interact with a third-party Python 3 library. This way, Home Assistant can share code with the Python community and keep the project maintainable.

Once you have your Python library ready and published to PyPI, add it to the manifest. It will now be time to implement the Entity base class that is provided by the integration that you are creating a platform for.

Find your integration at the entity index to see what methods and properties are available to implement.