Home Assistant

Automation modes

An automationAutomations in Home Assistant allow you to automatically respond to things that happen in and around your home.
[Learn more] can be triggered while it is already running.

The automation’s mode configuration option controls what happens when the automation is triggered while the actionsActions are used in several places in Home Assistant. As part of a script or automation, actions define what is going to happen once a trigger is activated. In scripts, an action is called sequence.
[Learn more] are still running from a previous triggerA trigger is a set of values or conditions of a platform that are defined to cause an automation to run.
[Learn more].

Mode Description
single (Default) Do not start a new run. Issue a warning.
restart Start a new run after first stopping the previous run. The automation only restarts if the conditions are met.
queued Start a new run after all previous runs complete. Runs are guaranteed to execute in the order they were queued. Note that subsequent queued automations will only join the queue if any conditions it may have are met at the time it is triggered.
parallel Start a new, independent run in parallel with previous runs.

For both queued and parallel modes, configuration option max controls the maximum number of runs that can be executing and/or queued up at a time. The default is 10.

When max is exceeded (which is effectively 1 for single mode) a log message will be emitted to indicate this has happened. Configuration option max_exceeded controls the severity level of that log message. Set it to silent to ignore warnings or set it to a log level. The default is warning.

Example throttled automation

Some automations you only want to run every 5 minutes. This can be achieved using the single mode and silencing the warnings when the automation is triggered while it’s running.

automation:
  - mode: single
    max_exceeded: silent
    trigger:
      - ...
    action:
      - ...
      - delay: 300  # seconds (=5 minutes)

Example queued

Sometimes an automation is doing an action on a device that does not support multiple simultaneous actions. In such cases, a queue can be used. In that case, the automation will be executed once it’s current invocation and queue are done.

automation:
  - mode: queued
    max: 25
    trigger:
      - ...
    action:
      - ...