Test project for significant changes to the Home Assistant Life360 integration
This project provides a way for willing users to try out significant changes to the integration before I submit them officially, and possibly affect many users with potential issues I didn't foresee. It would be great to get feedback from real world usage. If you're willing, read on...
The main purpose of the current set of changes is to use a single, central "data coordinator" to retrieve data from the Life360 server using all registered accounts (i.e., Life360 integrations), instead of each account/integration retrieving data individually as is done in the current implementation.
As a bit of background, the last set of significant changes (introduced in 2022.7) converted the integration from a "legacy" tracker to the new entity-based implementation. At the same time the code made use of the "standard" DataUpdateCoordinator class. But that resulted in each Life360 account being retreived separately, and hence there was no easy way to coordinate the data from multiple accounts.
These new changes goes back to one, "central" coordinator that retrieves data for all accounts at the same time. This allows the data to be handled in a much more intelligent way. E.g., once a Circle's Places & Members are retrieved, they do not need to be retrieved again if another account can access it. Also, Members that are in multiple Circles can have the best data used when they share their location differently in the different Circles.
Another significant change is that Members that have no available location data (e.g., they don't share location
with the Circles that are reachable, or their device has been off or has not had network access for a long time)
will still get registered in the Entity Registry and will have device_tracker entities created for them. This
keeps things consistent when Members "come and go" for these reasons. Of course, any entity can be hidden or
disabled via the Entity Registry if desired.
Lastly, a binary_sensor has been added for each account (aka config, aka integration) that indicates
if server communications are working ok - i.e., if it's "online". By default the name will be
"life360 online (USERNAME)", and the entity ID will be binary_sensor.life360_online_username, but they can,
of course, be changed via the Entities page, or the entity can be disabled if you'd rather not see it.
This is being tested with Home Assistant 2021.12.10 & the latest available release, using Python 3.9. If you're using different versions your mileage may vary. If you'd still like to give it a try, let me know what versions you're using and I'll try to test with them first.
It should go without saying you should make a backup of your configuration before giving this a try.
In theory this can be installed using HACS as a custom repository. Or you can manually install it.
Basically you need to get all of the files & folders in custom_components/life360 into a similarly named folder in your Home Assistant configuration folder. If you've never done that and are not sure how, see some suggestions below, or feel free to ask me for help, either via the Home Assistant Forum or by opening an issue here.
Once this custom integration is installed it will be used instead of the built-in integration.
| attribute | changed to | description |
|---|---|---|
reason |
added | If a Member's location is not available, the entity's state will become unknown and this attribute will explain why. |
ignored_update_reasons |
added | If a Member's location update is temporarily ignored because its last_seen attribute has gone "backwards", or its gps_accuracy doesn't satisfy the specified limit, this attribute will indicate which apply. |
Which you can do either via the Home Assistant Forum or by opening an issue here
At the top of this page, click on the Code button and pick the "Download ZIP" option at the bottom.
This will download the entire project. Unzip it, and copy the life360 foler into the custom_components
folder in your Home Assistant configuration directory.
If you do not have subversion, you can install it using sudo apt install subversion.
cd into the custom_components folder in your Home Assistant configuration directory.
Enter the following command:
svn export https://github.com/pnbruckner/ha-life360/trunk/custom_components/life360
This is actually the method I use. If you don't have git, you can install it using sudo apt install git.
First get whichever link you prefer by clicking on the Code button at the top of this page. There should be three options: HTTPS, SSH & GitHub CLI. Click on whichever you like, then click the copy button to the right of the link.
cd to some convenient directory, then enter the following command:
git clone <link_copied_from_code_button>
For example:
git clone https://github.com/pnbruckner/ha-life360.git
This will create a folder named ha-life360.
Now cd to custom_components in your Home Assistant configuration directory.
Enter the following command:
ln -s <path_to_ha-life360>/custom_components/life360 life360