Quickstart

Five minutes to a room running on the curve.

Prerequisites — Home Assistant 2026.10.0 or newer, HACS installed, and your lights assigned to areas, so FLARE can set itself up room by room.

  1. Step 1 — install via HACS
  2. Step 2 — restart, then add FLARE
  3. Step 3 — add the dashboard (optional)
  4. Adding a room later
  5. What now

Step 1 — install via HACS

Open your Home Assistant instance and open FLARE in HACS

The button opens FLARE in HACS on your Home Assistant, where you can download it.

Or add it by hand: HACS → three-dot menu → Custom repositories. Add:

https://github.com/danrspencer/flare

with type Integration. Then find FLARE in the HACS list and download it.

Step 2 — restart, then add FLARE

Restart Home Assistant, then Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → FLARE.

It asks:

  • How many schedules, and their names. A schedule is the day’s lighting: when each phase starts, and how bright and warm it is. One for the whole house is fine to start with; use more if parts of the house should differ, such as one per floor. Pick names you’re happy to keep: they become part of each schedule’s entity IDs.
  • What to set up for each area, and which schedule each area follows. Every area with lights is listed with a choice of – Don’t set up – or one of your schedules. An area starts on the schedule with the same name as its floor, or on your first schedule if none matches.

Each area you set up gets up to three things, named after it. All three is the default, and what most rooms want:

  What it does
A zone Keeps track of which lights FLARE is driving there, so it leaves alone a light you’ve changed yourself.
A room automation Built from the FLARE blueprint, with the area as its Lights & Occupancy: the lights in it follow the schedule, and its occupancy and motion sensors turn them on and off. Called “Area Lighting”, with a FLARE label so you can find them.
A flare A light for the whole room, for voice assistants and HomeKit.

The zone is always set up. Leave out the flare if you don’t use voice assistants and don’t want a light for the whole room. Leave out the automation if you’d rather build it yourself. The flare is left out with it, because a flare runs the room’s automation.

With all three, the room is ready to use. The automation is an ordinary one in Settings → Automations & Scenes, so you can change its inputs there.

A room with no occupancy or motion sensor still follows the curve, but never turns its lights on or off by itself.

Step 3 — add the dashboard (optional)

Settings → Dashboards → Add dashboard, and pick FLARE Lighting. It’s a dashboard with a view for each schedule and one for your zones, and it keeps up as you add more. See Dashboard.

Adding a room later

Settings → Devices & Services → FLARE → Set up area. It lists every area with lights. An area that already has a zone starts as – Don’t set up –: setting it up again keeps its zone but gives it another automation and flare, so only change it if it doesn’t have them.

The other buttons there add one thing at a time: Add schedule, Add zone and Add flare.

What now

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