Home Assistant Prune

DISCLAIMER: Use at your own risk! It has worked for me, it might not work for you, or even worse screw your system or eat your favorite pet.

Pull Requests, Bug Reports and Thank You are welcome and appreciated.

Problem Statement

Devices can be renamed outside of Home Assistant. When this happens, the integration does not propagate that change to Home Assistant, i.e., the entity_id is not changed. This makes sense to not break automations etc.

On the other hand, that causes names outside and inside of Home Assistant to diverge over time. See this feature request for concrete user stories.

Unfortunately, Home Assistant lacks a functionality to re-acquire the current names from the integrations.

Some forum ports that are related to the problem:

• Feature Request (please vote!): Reset / Re-acquire entity_id
• Question: Reset Hue entity ids?
• Question: Reset entity_id after name change
• Question: Rename entity_id for script any solutions?
• Question: Rename an Entity ID

Solution Approach

1. Remove all entities from file core.entity_registry where platform matches.
2. Remove the same entities from file core.restore_state, if existing.
3. Remove the devices with matching id from file core.device_registry.

Usage

First of all, stop Home Assistant. To my experience, the integration/platform does not need to be removed.

Backup your configuration directory. The script does not do backups.

Prune Entities

Run, e.g.

ha-prune.py --path homeassistant-config prune --platform hue

Use --dry-run or -n to not actually write anything to disk.

Restart Home Assistant. The entities should be automatically re-discovered under their new name (i.e. the names obtained from the integration).

Save and restore (friendly) names

The command:

ha-prune.py --path homeassistant-config save "out.json"

saves the friendly names, if set, for all entities. It produces a file like:

{
    "switch.horus": "Horus",
    "sensor.sentinel_1_air_temperature": "Flur",
    "device_tracker.thermostat_wohnzimmer": "Thermostat Wohnzimmer",
    "switch.janus_1": "Heizlüfter",
}

vice versa

ha-prune.py --path homeassistant-config restore out.json

restores the friendly names, if modified.

Known Problems

Unstable IDs

IDs like

device_id: c42cc5888a0c7349d8425023efdedac7
entity_id: 28b1c57400b2c8bc5930b8889505edcb

seem to be unstable when devices are re-discovered. Use entity_id like light.kitchen in your automations etc.