Homekit filter entities by label

[pgiblock]

Integration name

HomeKit Bridge

Link to integration documentation on our website

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit

Describe the enhancement

In the Homekit Bridge integration, one can filter which entities to expose via the filter map. Currently, this is by including or excluding entire domains, entity id globs, or specific entity ids. While this works, it quickly becomes quite cumbersome. For medium to large Hass deployments, *_domains can quickly become too broad for many domains. Same is true for *_entity_globs. I've found that I almost exclusively need to use include_entities to prevent accidentally introducing unwanted entities over time for most domains (besides niche ones such as climate. Unfortunately, this is an obscure and error prone mechanism for maintaining a simple list, and is brittle regarding entity renaming, etc.

I propose the addition of two new filters: include_labels and exclude_labels. With these filters, exposing an entity can be as simple as adding a Homekit label to entities of interest (or conversely excluding via a label such as Hide Homekit). Whether the device is exposed is apparent when looking at the Entity Info in the UI. The labels can be introspected via the UI or template code. Such a feature means that outside of initial configuration of the integration and possibly dealing with some quirks, the integration can be managed solely from the UI - which is much more state-of-art regarding Home Assistant's modern user experience.

Thank you!

Use cases

Allows quickly adding or hiding an entity from HomeKit when adding a new device. Easily add or remove an existing device. Change entity ids without impacting entity inclusion. Quickly see which entities are included or excluded.

Anything else?

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

🏷️ I've automatically added the integration: homekit label to help categorize this feature request.

[mano87]

That's along the lines of my suggestion. #3061

[villisek]

Would highly appreciate this as well, it'd be way more convenient to expose devices to the bridge that way.

[fabiangigler]

FYI: I opened a PR to support filtering exposed Homeassistant entities, devices and areas by labels here:
home-assistant/core#171134

If you feel confident, you can overwrite the built-in homekit bridge component by copying the homekit folder from the PR into your custom-components folder, add a version number to the manifest.json (see https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/creating_component_index/) and test it out yourself.

Feel free to share any feedback on the PR!