Installation

Schoolday ships as a single custom integration that also serves its own Lovelace cards. One install, no separate resource registration, and the integration and cards can never drift apart in version.

Requirements

• Home Assistant 2025.1 or newer
• HACS
• One calendar entity holding your school holidays, if you want Schoolday to know about them. Optional, and it can be added later.

Through HACS

The button opens Schoolday’s page in HACS on your own Home Assistant, which saves step 1. By hand:

1. HACS → search for Schoolday
2. Open it and download it
3. Restart Home Assistant
4. Settings → Devices & Services → Add integration → Schoolday

Step 3 is not optional and not a formality. The cards are registered while Home Assistant starts, so before a restart the integration installs but the dashboard has nothing to show — which reads exactly like a broken install.

Schoolday is in the HACS default store, so there is no repository to add. An install made earlier as a custom repository keeps working and keeps updating; there is nothing to move.

Setting it up

Everything below can be done twice: once in the integration’s own options dialog, and once from the admin card on a dashboard. They write the same configuration through the same rules — the card exists so nobody has to go and find the integration page to move one lesson.

1. Add each family member with a colour. Optionally a picture — point it at a person. entity and Home Assistant’s own picture is used, so it follows whatever they change it to. A way to school in minutes gives a child a leaving time; a child who takes the bus gets a fixed time instead, and one for holiday care.
2. Lesson times, one HH:MM-HH:MM per line. Breaks are derived from the gaps, so there is nothing else to configure. Children at a second school that rings differently get their own set; everybody else shares these.
3. One week per child. See Timetable.
4. Days off, if you have a holiday calendar. See Days that differ.
5. Routines, when you want them. See Routines.

None of the later steps are required for the earlier ones to work.

The cards look stale after an update

Close the Companion app completely and open it again. The bundle is served without a long-lived cache and its URL carries the version, so the server side is not the problem — the app holds its own copy until it is properly restarted. A browser reload is enough on a desktop.