A new home for every contributor

Welcome to contributors.home-assistant.io: one place for everyone who helps build Home Assistant.

For years, the information you needed to contribute lived in a lot of places. The developer documentation on developers.home-assistant.io. The design guidelines on design.home-assistant.io. The data science portal on data.home-assistant.io. And a whole lot more scattered across READMEs, pull request templates, and the heads of the people who have been around for a while.

The developer docs in particular grew the way documentation grows: page by page, over many years. A lot of it was still correct. Some of it described ways of working we stopped using a long time ago. And almost none of it took you by the hand if you were new.

So we started over.

Home Assistant is built by far more than developers. People translate it into their language. They write and fix the documentation. They design the interface, test the betas, moderate the forum, and answer questions from people who just got started. All of that is contributing, and all of it now has a place here.

The site is organized in areas, one for each way you can help: Core and integrations, the frontend, apps, the companion apps, the operating system, design, writing documentation, translations, the community, beta testing and releases, and data. Next to those are the topics that matter to everyone: the architecture, the roadmap, security, our brand, and a glossary.

Every area follows the same shape. It tells you what it is about and who it is for, gives you one concrete first contribution, and then the guides and the reference material. Once you know your way around one area, you know your way around all of them.

If you have never contributed to an open source project before, Get started is the place to begin. Your first contribution lists the paths that need no code first: translating, fixing a docs page, testing a beta, helping on the forum. For each path, it tells you which account you need and what happens after you take the step.

Never used GitHub? Use GitHub, without being a developer explains the words you will run into, like fork, branch, and pull request, and walks you through your first change entirely in the browser.

And once your first pull request is merged, there is more. Grow as a contributor describes what comes next: reviewing, becoming an integration owner, and the roles that exist in the different areas.

The design area replaces design.home-assistant.io, and it does something the old site couldn't. The components on its pages are the real components from the Home Assistant frontend, running in your browser. The buttons, sliders, pickers, dashboard cards, and more-info dialogs are the actual thing, connected to a small fake home, so you can try them out while you read how to use them.

Every component page follows the same order: what it is and when to use it, its parts and variants, its measurements, do's and don'ts you can see, and how it works with a keyboard and a screen reader. The code comes last, for the developers who build with it.

Home Assistant has its own words, and some of them changed names over the years. A service became an action. An add-on became an app. The glossary gives every term one page that says what it means, and what it is called in the code, in the interface, and in the past.

You don't have to go looking for it. When a page uses a glossary term, it is underlined with a dotted line. Point at it, and you see what it means.

Search runs fully in your browser. Nothing you type leaves your computer. It searches within the area you are in, or across everything, and it takes you straight to the right section of a page.

The roadmap explains how an idea becomes planned work at the Open Home Foundation: from a feature request to an opportunity on the roadmap, an epic, and the tasks and pull requests that ship it. It follows one real feature from start to finish, and shows where you can join in at every step.

If you have bookmarked a page on developers.home-assistant.io, design.home-assistant.io, or data.home-assistant.io, it takes you to its new home here. The developer blog moved too, with its posts at the same addresses.

A site this size is never done, and this one is brand new. We checked the content against the code of our projects, but you will find things that are wrong, outdated, or unclear. When you do, please tell us, or better: fix it. The site is open source, like everything else we build, and improving it works the same as contributing anywhere else in the project.

We can't wait to see what you build.