Plant Manager for Home Assistant

Plant Manager is a local, HACS-compatible custom integration for managing plant sensors, moisture limits, owners, reminders, watering history, care notes, and dashboard cards without editing a plant YAML file for every plant.

Version 0.7.6

• Replaced the live-data card-picker thumbnail with a simple branded preview that contains no plant or household information.

Version 0.7.5

• Added the required HACS manifest fields for documentation, issue tracking, and code ownership.

• Identified Plant Manager as a Home Assistant helper integration with calculated entities.

• Added HACS and Home Assistant hassfest validation workflows for GitHub.

• Blank Add Plant form: no plant, person, or notification service is preselected.

• No plants.yaml importer or household-specific defaults.

• Existing Plant Manager data remains in /config/.storage/plant_manager and is not changed by code updates.

• Assign moisture, battery, temperature, and illuminance sensors.

• Assign an optional Home Assistant person, area, and one or more notification services.

• Immediate and daily dry-plant notifications with Watered, Snooze 24h, and Not Yet actions.

• Per-plant status, last-watered timestamp, and watering-overdue binary sensor entities.

• Low-battery, unavailable-sensor, and overdue-watering warnings on the dashboard card.

• Fourteen days of hourly moisture samples, seven-day trend calculation, and estimated days until watering.

• Markdown care notes with a preview in Plant Manager and a collapsible dashboard section.

• Dashboard card visual editor, filters, one- or two-level sorting, and responsive columns.

• Optional dashboard warning display, with overdue watering suppressed while a plant is Too wet.

• Care Notes retain their manually chosen open/closed state across entity updates and browser refreshes.

• Live Markdown preview and a Save button that is disabled until an editable plant value changes.

• A compatibility card file in www for installations that still use /local/plant-manager-card.js.

• Fully theme-aware card, gauge, warning, Trend, Care Notes, and action colours with softened charcoal surfaces instead of pure black in Dark Mode.

• High-contrast Trend text that follows Home Assistant's primary text colour.

• Care Notes open/closed state shared across recreated card instances and saved in the current browser.

• Visual card editor rendered once per opening so Home Assistant state updates cannot collapse an active dropdown.

• Dashboard cards rebuild only when Plant Manager or assigned plant-sensor data changes, preventing open Care Notes from flickering during unrelated Home Assistant updates.

• Markdown Preview heading moved above its preview box.

• Disabled Save Plant button retains clearly readable text on a theme-aware grey background.

• Gauge ticks are drawn inward on the gauge band, with card-editor choices for 5% ticks, 2% ticks, or no tick marks; 10% labels remain visible.

• Android notifications use one dedicated Plant Manager notification channel.

• Selective watering-history maintenance can clear the last-watered date and watering records for one, several, or all plants without removing moisture trends or plant settings.

• The Plant Manager sidebar subscribes to add, update, and remove events so phone watering actions and other Plant Manager changes refresh without reloading the page.

The trend estimate needs at least three samples spanning six hours. It will initially display as calculating.

Local installation or update

1. Back up Home Assistant.

2. Copy the entire custom_components/plant_manager folder to /config/custom_components/plant_manager.

3. When updating, replace the files in that folder but do not delete /config/.storage/plant_manager.

4. Restart Home Assistant.

5. For a first installation, open Settings → Devices & services → Add integration, search for Plant Manager, and add it.

6. Open Settings → Dashboards → Resources and add this JavaScript module resource:

   /plant_manager/plant-manager-card.js?v=0.7.6

7. The ZIP also contains www/plant-manager-card.js. If you prefer the older method, copy it to /config/www/plant-manager-card.js and use /local/plant-manager-card.js?v=0.7.6 instead. Configure only one of the two resource URLs.

8. Hard-refresh the browser or reload the Home Assistant app frontend.

Because the card is served from inside the integration, future manual updates require copying only the plant_manager folder. Change the ?v= value when a new release says the card changed; this forces browsers to load the new file.

HACS installation and updates

The source layout is suitable for a HACS integration repository. HACS custom repositories are added using a repository URL; HACS does not document adding an arbitrary local filesystem path as a custom repository. To receive normal HACS update notices, publish these files in a GitHub repository, add it to HACS as an Integration custom repository, and create versioned releases/tags.

The official public project repository is BigMacQ/Plant-Manager, and it can be added to HACS as a custom Integration repository.

Without a public hosted repository, use the local installation method above. Manual copying is a valid update method and preserves Plant Manager's storage file.

Dashboard card

Add Custom: Plant Manager Card from the dashboard card picker. The visual editor supports:

• all, dry, too-wet, or attention filters;
• one to six columns;
• primary and secondary sorting by plant, room, owner, status, or moisture;
• optional room and owner filters;
• battery warning threshold;
• gauge tick spacing of 5%, 2%, or no tick marks, with larger divisions and labels every 10%;
• temperature, battery, illuminance, care-note, and trend visibility.

YAML remains available if preferred:

type: custom:plant-manager-card
filter: all
columns: 3
sort_by:
  - room
  - plant_name
show_temperature: true
show_battery: true
show_illuminance: true
show_care_notes: true
show_trend: true
show_warnings: true
low_battery_threshold: 20
gauge_tick_spacing: 5

Migration note

The early development build had a one-time importer for one household's plants.yaml. That importer has been removed. Plants already saved by Plant Manager continue to load from /config/.storage/plant_manager; the original plants.yaml can remain as a backup until the user chooses to remove it.

License

Plant Manager is available under the MIT License.