mealie/docs/docs/documentation/community-guide/home-assistant.md

!!! info
	This guide was submitted by a community member. Find something wrong? Submit a PR to get it fixed!


In a lot of ways, Home Assistant is why this project exists! Since Mealie has a robust API it makes it a great fit for interacting with Home Assistant and pulling information into your dashboard.

### Get Todays Meal in Lovelace
Starting in v0.4.1 you are now able to use the uri `/api​/meal-plans​/today​/image?group_name=Home` to directly access the image to todays meal. This makes it incredibly easy to include the image into your Home Assistant Dashboard using the picture entity. 

Here's an example where `sensor.mealie_todays_meal` is pulling in the meal-plan name and I'm using the url to get the image.

![api-extras-gif](../../assets/img/home-assistant-card.png)

```yaml
type: picture-entity
entity: sensor.mealie_todays_meal
name: Dinner Tonight
show_state: true
show_name: true
image: 'http://localhost:9000/api/meal-plans/today/image?group_name=Home'
style:
.: |
    ha-card {
    max-height: 300px !important;
    overflow: hidden;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
    }
```

The sensor that gets the name of the meal can be achieved using the following REST sensor in Home Assistant
```yaml
sensor:
  - platform: rest
    resource: 'http://localhost:9000/api/meal-plans/today'
    method: GET
    name: Mealie todays meal 
    headers:
      Authorization: Bearer MySuperSecretBearerCode
    value_template: "{{ value_json.name }}"
```
The Bearer token can be created from the User Settings page (https://hay-kot.github.io/mealie/documentation/users-groups/user-settings/#api-key-generation) 


!!! tip
    Due to how Home Assistant works with images, I had to include the additional styling to get the images to not appear distorted. This includes and [additional installation](https://github.com/thomasloven/lovelace-card-mod) from HACS.