How I Added My Ring Doorbell to Home Assistant (and Why I’m Going Back to the Ring App)

• Home Assistant offers a centralized platform for smart home devices without cloud sharing.

• Integrating the Ring Video Doorbell into Home Assistant is simple and user-friendly, but it comes with some serious limitations.

• Not all Home Assistant integrations are equal; A more robust MQTT integration is available if you’re willing to invest the time and effort.

Want to add your Ring Video Doorbell to Home Assistant? I recently added mine, so let me show you how I did it and tell you what I learned along the way.

Why Does It Trouble Doing This?

If you haven’t heard of Home Assistant before, I recommend you read it. Our Home Assistant explainer to speed you up. In summary, Home Assistant is a free and open-source, community-supported home automation platform that can manage a wide range of smart home devices and brands.

With the vast and ever-expanding variety of smart home devices filling our homes comes a growing collection of applications required to manage them. You can consolidate using many of these. Smart home platforms such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa or Apple HomeKit but if you don’t want all your data to be in their respective clouds, Home Assistant can do this locally without having to share your data.

What first attracted me to HA was the appeal of having all my devices managed under one application. It takes devices and breaks their features down into individual “sensors” and actions that you can then use to combine automations across different brands and devices. This means my Ring doorbell can trigger an automation that turns on my entry light via my Lutron Caseta switch (as an example).

The great thing about HA is that with such extensive community support, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a device that couldn’t be brought into its ecosystem without at least some work. The same community is also working hard to make it easier to add and manage devices. When I saw that Ring was already a mainstream integration for HA, adding my doorbell was a no-brainer.

How to Add Your Ring Video Doorbell to Home Assistant?

Thanks to native integration, it’s easy to add your Ring Video Doorbell (or all your Ring devices, for that matter) to Home Assistant. All steps can be done in the user interface without the need to edit lines in a configuration file or install dependent modules.

From Home Assistant’s Settings tab, click “Devices and Services.” Click the “Add Integration” button in the bottom right corner. In the loaded dialog box, search for ‘ring’ and then click on the “Ring” entry. You can also scroll down the list to find Ring integration.

At this point you will be asked to enter your Ring credentials. if there is two factor authentication You will also need to enter your one-time password once it is activated for your Ring account. Once Home Assistant is successfully logged into your Ring account, it will automatically discover all your devices and optionally present you with a dialog box to group them into spaces.

And you’re done! When you return to your Overview page, your doorbell, along with all your other Ring devices, will be listed under the spaces you assigned. Now that your doorbell is in HA, you will be able to control all the individual features HA can use from your control panel.

From here, you’re ready to create automations that incorporate your doorbell’s features, such as using the motion sensor or triggering the chime.

I’m Creating My First Automation

Integrating your out-of-the-box doorbell into Home Assistant unlocks features only available through Ring integration on the device. None of the features that are automatically exposed by your Ring app, such as activity notifications, will happen in HA unless you specifically set them as automation. Fortunately, they’re pretty simple to create using the familiar “if X happens, do Y” workflow.

This is where you’ll start to see some of the big differences in managing devices in HA compared to the Ring app. All logic that provides functionality such as simple notifications needs to be clearly defined for each device you want to set up. Creating these recipes can take some trial and error as you search for the appropriate buttons and levers needed to create your triggers and actions.

It took me a few more times to find the right automation recipe to get a “motion detected” notification because of how functions are mapped and labeled in the Ring integration. Not everything was categorized as intuitively as I would have liked. Below is what I needed to make a simple recipe to send notifications when motion is detected on my Ring doorbell:

How Does My Doorbell Work Now?

I initially spent some time trying to recreate some of the notifications I was receiving through my Ring app, but it didn’t take long to realize that going down this path would take forever. Not only will I need to create each notification type, but I will also need to repeat this for each device.

Once installed, my notifications were pretty basic compared to my Ring app notifications. Yes, I can receive simple text notifications similar to the ones I get from the Ring app, but these were purely static text notifications, whereas the ones from the Ring app had a neat snapshot image along with the text. It is possible to recreate this functionality, but it will be a much more complicated process.

What’s great about Home Assistant is also what makes it intimidating. You have access to a wide range of functions, but it’s up to you to put them together into coherent and user-friendly automations. It’s like starting a Lego project where all the pieces are thrown into a giant pile. This gets tiring because you have to figure out the details of the necessary steps, build, test, debug and iterate like an app developer does.

For some, this may be a nice and fun endeavor, but if you’re like me, you want it to be easy.

Once running, notifications arrived reliably (whether I was home or not) but lagged significantly. Using my phone’s stopwatch, I timed Ring app notifications from the first motion event at under 3 seconds, while the HA app took over 30 seconds, too long to be actionable.

After completing the basic notification, I tried to create another one that also turns on my entry lights when my doorbell is pressed. This didn’t go so well because I couldn’t figure out how to actually trigger the notification when the doorbell button was pressed. After trying multiple triggers (then running up and down the stairs to ring my doorbell) I gave up on my attempt when my legs ran out of gas.

But manually triggering actions from within my automation worked seamlessly. The notification was almost instantaneous and my lights came on as well. At least the integration with my mobile push notifications and lights worked seamlessly.

Besides my failed attempt at automation (probably user error), another thing I neglected to consider is the fact that Home Assistant runs natively on my home hardware. Without enabling remote network access, the app cannot connect to my Home Assistant server. More importantly, I couldn’t do what I consider normal with the Ring app: tap the notification to turn on the camera’s live feed.

We’ve outlined a few ways to open up your network. How-to to access your network remotelybut it later turned out that I still couldn’t view my camera live footage because I found out the Ring integration didn’t support it. This brings me to my next observation.

Not All Integrations Are Created Equal

In addition to the lack of live view capability, the timing disparity I see between native Ring app notifications and HA-based notifications is likely attributable to the integration rather than the Home Assistant itself. Integrations are created by different teams or, if you’re lucky, the device manufacturer; therefore, the results of using integration can vary greatly.

Fortunately, for most, if not all, supported integrations, Home Assistant has integration-specific pages that outline key features and limitations for you.

Their guide includes a useful pair of metrics: IoT class and quality scale. These scores or grades can give you insight into the robustness and user-friendliness of a particular HA integration. You can find a breakdown of classifications and scales in Home Assistant. Internet of Things classification And quality scale pages.

Ring Integration page It gave medium scores on the quality scale, with a “Cloud Survey” and a “Silver” IoT classification. This might explain why my notifications are so slow (your network also plays a vital role, but I know mine is pretty fast). Notifications would be much faster if the Ring integration were rated Gold or Platinum on the quality scale.

In my experience with Home Assistant, a recurring theme has always been “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” What I’ve written so far has been about using the standard Ring integration, but there is also a much more powerful integration using the MQTT protocol. You’ll find that there are multiple integration paths for other devices as well.

MQTT-based integration eliminates many of the limitations of standard Ring integration, but this trade-off becomes more complex during setup and implementation. Going into details would probably take up space in more than one article, so I’ll save that for another time (if I can spare the time and energy).

Ultimately, while I could see the tremendous potential of using Home Assistant instead of my Ring app, the inherent limitations of integration and my reluctance to go even further down the rabbit hole led me to remain dependent on the Ring app.

Home Assistant is a feature-rich playground for tinkerers looking to create sophisticated Rube Goldberg-like recipes, but I’ll stick with the easy button for now.