A very simple Home Assistant custom component to query a portainer server for a list of containers. It creates a sensor for the server itself, named sensor.portainer_server_ and then a sensor for each container on the server, named sensor.portainer__. Each sensor has several extra attributes such as how long it's been running, what image it's running, and the url to quickly get to that server.
- I've only tested this with HTTP. It may need some tweaking to work with HTTPS portainer servers.
- A docker host with portainer running and an open non-HTTPS-Port (You might want to open 9000)
- A Home Assistant instance
- 10 Minutes or less.
Check out your Home Assistant's custom_components folder, make a subdirectory called portainer and copy the files __init__.py, manifest.json and sensor.py.
Alternatively, you can run git clone https://github.com/tenly2000/portainer_listing.git portainer from within custom_components. You can ignore other files like README.md.
You'll need to restart Home Assistant now!
The plugin can not be configured via the UI, so you'll need to write some YAML. You'll need to add instances of the sensor integration with the platform portainer. You'll find this in your configuration.yaml, or if you did choose to split your configuration into multiple files, in one of those. If you don't have a sensor-section in your configuration files, simply create one.
Every configuration entry needs to define the following variables:
| Variable | Required | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| url | yes | The URL (including Protocol and Port), where your Portainer instance can be reached | http://nas15local:9000 |
| name | yes | How you want your Portainer instance to be shown inside Home Assitant | nas15 |
| username | yes | Valid username to your portainer instance | username |
| password | yes | Valid password to the username you gave before | supersecurepassword |
It is recommended, to use Home Assistans feature for storing secrets, in order to not directly include them in your configuration.yaml.
sensor:
- platform: portainer
url: http://<hostname, fqdn or ip>:9000
name: nas15
username: !secret port_user
password: !secret port_pass
# To monitor multiple docker hosts, you can add more instances as you need:
- platform: portainer
url: http://<hostname, fqdn or ip>:8080 # If you chose to open port 9000 as port 8080, for example
name: pi10
username: !secret port_user # If you have multiple instances with different credentials, make sure to create individual secret variables!
password: !secret port_passThis component was created by GPT-4 over 3 2-hour sessions. The component does exactly what I needed/wanted and it is quite likely to fall far short of what you were hoping for - so take it, extend it - and then re-share it! This was just an experiment for me to see if I could convince GPT-4 to create a basic custom component that works without having to write a single line of code. It's not something that I plan to support, extend or develop further - but if it is useful to you, take it and do with it as you will.
I have Portainer running on my NAS, 2 Raspberry Pi's and 2 Debian VM's and I was finding it hard to remember what containers were running on which servers - so I searched for a Portainer integration. I found one that seemed pretty robust but looked like it was only intended to interact with a single Portainer server co-existing with Home Assistant - and I think it was also marked as deprecated?
In any case, I needed something simpler, but that could work with multiple servers. All I really wanted was to see what containers were on each server and if they were running or stopped, but I didn't have the first clue as to how to build a custom integration - so I reached out to GPT4 and explained what I wanted - and after 2.5 days of testing auto-generated code and going back and forth with GPT-4, it finally provided an init.py, a manifest.json and a sensor.py file that do what I need!
This may not be useful to anyone other than me - and I don't have time to make it more robust or document it - but on the off chance that someone else wants to take it further, I'll attach my files here.
This post isn't so much a "look at the great component I created", but more of a "Holy Crap! I used GPT-4 to build a working custom component without having to write a single line of code!!!"
I don't need any credit or attribution for this. If it's useful to you - take it. If not, ignore it.
But just know that it IS possible to get GPT-4 to create a working custom component if you have the patience to go back and forth with it for a day or two. I've also used ChatGPT3.5 to configure some Lovelace multi-entity cards for me since I was too lazy to look up the documentation for it.
When you're trying to understand some of the Home Assistant documentation - that doesn't have any examples - just paste it in to ChatGPT and ask it to generate some examples for you! I've only been doing it for a couple of days so far - but I already find it a huge time saver.
The Dashboard was created usign the auto-entities card from HACS. I included my dashboard code in a file named dashboard.yaml but it won't work unless you first install the auto-entities component. https://github.com/thomasloven/lovelace-auto-entities
