Watching entities

Stream Home Assistant entity state into scripts and status bars through the bridge.

Watch commands print an entity’s state straight away, then again on every change. Each watcher is a small client of the bridge, so any number of them share the bridge’s one Home Assistant connection.

Any entity

watch entity (w e) takes the full entity ID:

ha-bridge watch entity input_boolean.guest_mode

Without --bar-json it prints the raw state on each line and warns on stderr that scripts should use JSON. With --bar-json it prints one JSON object per line for status bars and scripts:

ha-bridge watch entity input_boolean.guest_mode \
  --bar-json \
  --text-on "Guest" \
  --tooltip-on "Guest mode is on" \
  --tooltip-off "Guest mode is off" \
  --class-on active \
  --class-off inactive

See Bar JSON for the output and every flag.

Covers and climate

cover watch and climate watch take the entity name without its domain, like the action commands, and always print bar JSON with a summary of the entity:

ha-bridge cover watch office_blind
# {"class":"open","name":"Office Blind","text":"open • 40%","tooltip":"open • 40%"}

ha-bridge climate watch air_conditioner
# {"class":"cool","name":"Air Conditioner","text":"Cool • Low • 21 °C","tooltip":"Cool • Low • 21 °C"}

• Covers show the state, then the current tilt position when the cover has one.
• Climate entities show the HVAC mode (cool as Cool), the fan mode (1 as Low, 2 as High) and the target temperature.
• Both show unavailable on its own when the entity is unavailable.

When the bridge goes away

A watcher prints nothing until the bridge has a state for the entity, then keeps running across Home Assistant reconnects. It exits with status 1 when it can’t reach the bridge, or when the bridge stops. Run watchers under something that restarts them, such as Waybar’s restart-interval or a systemd unit with Restart=on-failure.