How the project is organized

Home Assistant is an open source project, owned by a non-profit foundation and built together with a community of contributors. This page explains how those pieces fit, so you know who you're working with.

Home Assistant belongs to the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization. Home Assistant and other projects were transferred to the foundation in 2024. Today, the foundation also owns projects like ESPHome and Music Assistant.

The foundation employs more than 50 people full-time. They work in the same repositories, follow the same review process, and talk in the same channels as everyone else. You'll meet them in reviews, but they're far from the only people who review and merge.

The foundation stands for three values in the smart home: privacy, choice, and sustainability. They come back in our principles. Its structure page explains how it is governed and funded.

The foundation is funded by commercial partner fees and donations. Its current commercial partners are Nabu Casa and Apollo Automation. Each is contractually required to contribute a majority of its profit from selling licensed products to the foundation.

Nabu Casa is the official provider of Home Assistant products and services, like Home Assistant Link: an optional subscription that adds remote access, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and cloud speech for Assist.

All the work happens in the open, on GitHub, under the home-assistant organization. A few repositories you'll come across early:

• core: Home Assistant Core and all built-in integrations, in Python.
• frontend: the web interface, in TypeScript.
• home-assistant.io: the user documentation.
• android and iOS: the companion apps.
• supervisor and operating-system: what installs, updates, and runs everything.
• architecture: discussions and decisions about how Home Assistant is built.

Some projects live in other organizations of the foundation, like the voice intents in OHF-Voice. Repositories lists them all, and tells you which one to go to for what.

Anyone can open an issue, a pull request, or a review. Who decides what gets merged depends on the repository:

• Maintainers can approve and merge pull requests. Each repository has its own maintainers, often organized in GitHub teams, like @home-assistant/core for Home Assistant Core.
• Integration owners are responsible for an integration. In Home Assistant Core, every integration lists its owners in the codeowners field of its manifest. They get notified about its issues, and GitHub asks them to review pull requests that touch it.
• Reviewers can be anyone. A careful review from a contributor helps maintainers decide faster.

Bigger questions, like a new type of entity or a rule that applies to all integrations, are discussed in the open in the architecture repository. How architecture decisions are made explains how that works.

A CODEOWNERS file tells GitHub who to ask for a review. In Home Assistant Core and on home-assistant.io, it names people and a few GitHub teams of the home-assistant organization:

• @home-assistant/core: the core files, and the integrations the core team owns
• @home-assistant/frontend: the frontend, lovelace, and panel_custom integrations
• @home-assistant/supervisor: the hassio integration, and the files that build the container image
• @home-assistant/cloud: the cloud, alexa, and google_assistant integrations, behind Home Assistant Link
• @home-assistant/matter: the matter integration
• @home-assistant/z-wave: the zwave_js integration

A few integrations are owned by a team outside the organization, like the team of a manufacturer. In Core, the CODEOWNERS file is generated from the manifests of the integrations, so it changes when the manifests do.

The owners of an integration are listed in the codeowners field of its manifest.json. To become one, open a pull request that adds your GitHub username there. It helps a lot to have worked on the integration first. The integration owner explains what the role asks of you, and how to update the files.

Two kinds of people work on Home Assistant:

• Staff are employed by the Open Home Foundation. The foundation pays their salaries, from the fees of its commercial partners and from donations. Its structure page has the details.
• Volunteers aren't paid. They contribute in their free time, because they care about Home Assistant.

Both work in the same repositories, under the same rules. Most contributors are volunteers. That shapes how the project works: reviews can take a while, nobody owes anyone a merge, and patience goes both ways. It also means the project is shaped by the people who show up. If you care about something, you can help make it happen.

The foundation plans larger work in the open. Its board sets the goals. The product team turns some of the feature requests into opportunities on the roadmap: problems worth solving, not a list of features with dates. Opportunities are delivered through epics and tasks in the repositories where the work happens.

You influence it through feature requests: share your idea, vote, and discuss. From idea to release walks through every step, and shows where you can join in.