What are add-ons in Home Assistant?
The content learned so far has shown that Home Assistant can handle most of the resources required to automate your home. The concept of add-ons was introduced to include more features to Home Assistant besides its main purpose. Add-ons are software applications that extend Home Assistant’s usability. They can be used as part of Home Assistant's functionality or work totally independent to it. We already briefly covered the installation of some add-on software such as the Mosquitto MQTT broker in Chapter 1 and File editor in Chapter 5. All the add-on software provided by Home Assistant is free to use.
Add-ons can be installed in the same way by following the Settings | Add-ons path and then clicking on the ADD-ON Store button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. They are split into two categories – Official add-ons and Home Assistant Community Add-ons. The official add-ons are maintained by the Home Assistant team while...