Home Assistant Integration
Connect Gubbins to Home Assistant and your inventory becomes part of your smart home — ask a voice assistant "where are my allen keys?", or surface stock levels as entities for automations and dashboards. This runs through the bridge.
Where to find it: the Home Assistant screen (in the menu, when the module is enabled) — which includes a built-in, step-by-step setup guide.
💡 Tip You don't have to piece this together yourself. The Home Assistant screen has a guided, step-by-step wizard — Overview → Access token → Run the bridge → Feed it data → Install in HA → Connect → Voice sentences → Try it — that adapts to your choices and gives copy-and-paste commands. It's the easiest way in.
ℹ️ Note This is an enthusiast feature that assumes you already run Home Assistant and the bridge. The in-app guide walks you through everything; the authoritative reference lives in the bridge
READMEin the Gubbins repository.
- Ask where things are. A custom integration answers spoken "where is / where are my…" questions, speaking the location back — Gubbins does the lookup and Home Assistant relays it.
- Light up where it is. Each spoken lookup also raises an event in Home Assistant naming the item and the location it's in, so an automation can react — the classic example being to flash the light above the right bin while it reads the answer back. The same details come back from the search action, for dashboards and scripts that don't involve voice. If you'd rather not install the custom integration at all, the bridge can publish the same answer to an MQTT topic instead, which Home Assistant or Node-RED can trigger on. It's sent live and never replayed, so a lookup can't light a bin hours after the fact.
- See stock as entities. Via MQTT discovery, Gubbins can publish summary figures (like low/out-of-stock counts) that appear automatically as Home Assistant entities — ready for dashboards and automations.
- Keep the light mapping in Gubbins. Each location entity also carries that location's own custom fields as attributes. So you can record which light sits above a shelf on the shelf itself, and have an automation read it from there — instead of keeping a separate list of locations and lights in your Home Assistant configuration. A location's fields are published as soon as MQTT publishing is on, so it's worth knowing what goes out if you'd already set MQTT up.
- Automate on changes. Because the bridge delivers webhooks and change events, you can trigger Home Assistant automations from inventory changes (e.g. notify when something runs low).
Everything above sends information to Home Assistant. One feature reads from it: if you have a scale exposed as a Home Assistant entity, counting by weight can pull the current reading straight into the app rather than you typing it in.
This is off by default and enabled on the bridge, by pointing it at your Home Assistant instance and giving it a long-lived access token (created in Home Assistant under Profile → Security). Once it's on, the Count by weight dialog gains a scale picker, a Read the scale button and a Read the container button for weighing the empty tray. The in-app setup guide covers the settings on its Run the bridge step.
💡 Tip When the bridge starts with this turned on, it checks the connection to Home Assistant there and then, and says so in its log if the address is wrong or the token was rejected — rather than leaving you to find out the first time you press Read the scale.
ℹ️ Note The token lives on the bridge, not in the app — the app only ever receives the resulting weight. The bridge can read entity states and nothing else: it cannot call a Home Assistant service, so it can't switch, unlock or actuate anything in your home.
The reading goes through the bridge rather than the app talking to Home Assistant directly,
because a browser on a secure page isn't allowed to contact a plain-http address on your
network. The bridge sits on the same network as Home Assistant, so it can.
Discovery works in both directions, and each side is separately opt-in.
The bridge can advertise itself on your network (mDNS/zeroconf), so Home Assistant can discover it rather than you typing addresses — an opt-in, locally-gated convenience.
The bridge can also find Home Assistant, so you don't have to type its address into the bridge either. Switch it on and leave the address blank: the bridge asks your network where Home Assistant is when it starts, uses the address it advertises, and says which one it found in its log.
ℹ️ Note A discovered address is only ever a suggestion. An address you set yourself always wins, the long-lived access token is still required — discovery never finds a credential — and what the bridge may do with Home Assistant is unchanged: read entity states, nothing more.
If nothing answers, the bridge just starts without a scale connection and tells you so; set the address directly and restart.
If you choose to enable it, Home Assistant can also adjust stock through the bridge — a peer device that writes back through Gubbins' safe merge so it can't cause drift. Write-back is off by default.
⚠️ Heads-up Exposing the bridge to Home Assistant means it's reachable on your LAN. Use a strong token, keep write-back off unless you need it, and treat the whole setup as trusted-network only. See Privacy & security.
- Bridge overview and Running the bridge — the foundation.
- AI assistant query (MCP) — the same lookups for AI assistants.
- Webhooks — calling a Home Assistant webhook when your inventory changes.
- Webhooks, MQTT & iCal — the event stream, MQTT and calendar in detail.