Integrate REST Calls into Home Assistant

Home Assistant is a powerful open-source home automation platform that allows you to control various smart devices and services in your home. While Home Assistant provides a wide range of integrations and automation possibilities out of the box, sometimes you may want to interact with external services or devices that aren’t directly supported. In such cases, you can use RESTful API calls to extend the capabilities of your Home Assistant setup.
In this post, we explore the process of initiating REST calls in Home Assistant.

Enable REST Calls in Home Assistant

To trigger REST calls from Home Assistant, we need to configure two main components. The rest_command platform and the automation or any entity to trigger the rest_command.

Define a REST Command: In the Home Assistant file configuration.yaml, define the rest_command and specify the details of the REST call to execute. After configuring the REST command, restart Home Assistant to apply the changes.

rest_command:
  trigger_external_service:
    url: "https://api.example.com/endpoint"
    method: POST
    payload: '{"key": "value"}'
    content_type: "application/json"
    verify_ssl: true

• url: The URL of the external service or API.
• method: The HTTP method to use (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
• payload: The data to send in the request body.
• content_type: The content type of the request.
• verify_ssl: Enable / Disable SSL verification

Trigger the REST Command: An automation or component that triggers the REST command can be added directly in the Home Assistant Web Interface. To ensure the REST call is executed correctly, test the setup and monitor the execution or check the Home Assistant logs for any errors.

type: button
name: Execute REST call
show_name: true
show_icon: true
tap_action:
  action: call-service
  service: rest_command.trigger_external_service
icon: mdi:cat

Conclusion

Triggering REST calls from Home Assistant provides possibilities to customize and extend an existing Home Automation setup and enables features like interacting with web services, or creating custom notifications. With a two-step configuration any REST call can be seamlessly integrated into Home Assistant to archive a flexible and more comprehensive smart home environment.