What is home-assistant.io?

home-assistant/home-assistant.io — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-24

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

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

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

Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

What do people build with it?

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.

What is it built with?

HTMLJekyllRubyNetlify

How does it compare?

	home-assistant/home-assistant.io	whatwg/html	themesberg/flowbite
Stars	9,228	9,220	9,242
Language	HTML	HTML	HTML
Setup difficulty	moderate	moderate	easy
Complexity	2/5	3/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	vibe coder

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get 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.

So what is it?

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.

Frequently asked questions