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Tips and tricks

This page provides some tips and tricks that may help you as a contributor to Home Assistant. The list here is by no means exhaustive, and if you pick up any additional undocumented tips and tricks, please open a PR to add them here.

Tips and tricks​

Keep PRs simple​

See the Component Checklist for PR expectations.

Test package dependency changes in Home Assistant​

See the API library docs for more information.

Test Core integration changes in your production Home Assistant environment​

If you made a change to a core integration and you want to test it in your production Home Assistant environment, copy the integration folder into /config/custom_components, add a version to the manifest.json (e.g. "version": "0.0.0"), and restart Home Assistant. Home Assistant will always prioritize integrations in custom_components over the core integration. Don't forget to remove it once you are done testing; otherwise, you will be stuck on that version.

When adding a config flow to an integration, be aware of the frontend​

The Home Assistant frontend caches aggressively, and as such, the first time you run Home Assistant with your new changes, you may not see the integration show up in the integration list. Check the logs to make sure there were no errors, and if not, perform a hard refresh of your browser window and try again; in many cases, that will resolve your issue.

Getting additional support​

#developers on the Home Assistant Discord server are great places to ask questions. Pro tip: Before you post your question, push the code you are working on into a branch and push that branch somewhere public and paste a link to it along with your question so that the person who is helping you can see your code. Please do NOT paste code blobs into the channel as it's hard to read and hides other questions/discussions.

If you see a way to improve the developer docs, please pay it forward and submit a PR to update them. See the next tip for more details.

Missing information in the developer docs​

The Home Assistant maintainers try to keep the developer docs up to date, but we also rely on contributors like you to help us correct, improve, and expand on our existing documentation. Like Home Assistant, this documentation is open source, and PRs are welcome. When in doubt, click the Edit this page button in the bottom left to get to the source file and to edit the file directly on GitHub. No command line is needed!