HealthLog/docs/integrations/home-assistant.md

Home Assistant and other push integrations

HealthLog pulls from Withings, WHOOP, Fitbit, Oura, Polar and Strava over OAuth. A local sensor has no such door: a BLE scale, a Garmin bridge or a Zigbee thermometer lives in your own automation platform and has to push. This page covers that path — a token you mint yourself, and the two endpoints it reaches.

Nothing here is specific to Home Assistant. Node-RED, a cron job with curl, or anything else that can set a header works the same way.

Mint a token

Settings → API & Tokens → Measurement ingest token. Name it after the thing you are pasting it into, because that name is what you will be reading later when you decide whether to revoke it.

The token is shown once. It is stored as an HMAC, so there is no page that can show it to you again — if you lose it, mint another and revoke the old one.

Tokens expire after a year by default. They appear in the API Tokens list on the same page alongside every other credential on the account, and are revoked there.

What the token can and cannot do

It can add readings, on your own record, through:

• POST /api/measurements — one reading, or a small array of them
• POST /api/measurements/batch — up to 500 entries per call

It cannot read a reading back, change or delete one, reach the export, or mint another token. That is the point of it being a separate credential rather than a general one: a container you do not fully trust — a Home Assistant add-on, a script from a forum — holds something whose worst case is junk in your own record, not your health history leaving the building.

It also cannot be pointed at somebody else's record. If an account has shared their record with you, this credential still will not write to it; use the web app for that.

Readings arrive as manually entered

Rows written with this token carry source: MANUAL, the same label a reading you type in by hand gets. Two consequences worth knowing:

• You can correct them in the UI. Readings owned by a connected provider are read-only; these are not.
• They do not claim to be from Apple Health. An entry that explicitly names APPLE_HEALTH is refused with a 422 rather than quietly relabelled — that source is half the deduplication key the iOS app writes into, and a bridge borrowing it corrupts the phone's sync rather than merely mislabelling a row.

For the same reason, a push through this token does not move the native sync checkpoint. Your phone's own sync window is unaffected by your scale.

Home Assistant example

Add a rest_command to configuration.yaml. Keep the token in secrets.yaml, not here.

rest_command:
  healthlog_measurement:
    url: "https://healthlog.example.com/api/measurements"
    method: POST
    headers:
      Authorization: !secret healthlog_token
      Content-Type: "application/json"
    payload: >-
      {
        "type": "{{ type }}",
        "value": {{ value }},
        "measuredAt": "{{ now().isoformat() }}"
      }

# secrets.yaml
healthlog_token: "Bearer hlk_replace_me"

Then call it from an automation. This one forwards a scale whenever it reports a new weight:

automation:
  - alias: "Push weight to HealthLog"
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: sensor.bathroom_scale_weight
    condition:
      - condition: template
        value_template: "{{ trigger.to_state.state not in ['unknown', 'unavailable'] }}"
    action:
      - service: rest_command.healthlog_measurement
        data:
          type: WEIGHT
          value: "{{ trigger.to_state.state | float }}"

The condition is not decoration. Home Assistant sensors publish unknown and unavailable as ordinary states, and forwarding one produces a 422 on every restart.

Measurement types

type is an enum, not free text. Some of the ones a Garmin or scale integration tends to have:

What the sensor reports	type	Unit expected
Weight	WEIGHT	kg
Body fat	BODY_FAT	%
Resting heart rate	RESTING_HEART_RATE	bpm
Heart-rate variability (SDNN)	HEART_RATE_VARIABILITY	ms
Heart-rate variability (RMSSD)	HRV_RMSSD	ms
Blood oxygen	OXYGEN_SATURATION	%
VO₂ max	VO2_MAX	ml/kg/min
Respiratory rate	RESPIRATORY_RATE	breaths/min
Sleep duration	SLEEP_DURATION	minutes
Steps	ACTIVITY_STEPS	count
Body temperature	BODY_TEMPERATURE	°C

Units are derived server-side from the type, so send the number in the unit above and do not send a unit field. The full enum is in docs/api/openapi.yaml under MeasurementType.

Sending several readings at once

A bare array writes up to five readings in one request — the shape to use for blood pressure, which is two rows:

curl -X POST https://healthlog.example.com/api/measurements \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hlk_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[
        { "type": "BLOOD_PRESSURE_SYS", "value": 118, "measuredAt": "2026-03-14T07:20:00Z" },
        { "type": "BLOOD_PRESSURE_DIA", "value": 76,  "measuredAt": "2026-03-14T07:20:00Z" }
      ]'

For a backfill of hundreds of rows, use /api/measurements/batch instead. It takes up to 500 entries and reports a per-entry status so a partial failure tells you which rows to retry.

Retries and duplicates

Send an Idempotency-Key header with a value your automation can reproduce for the same reading. A retry with the same key returns the original response instead of writing a second row:

headers:
  Authorization: !secret healthlog_token
  Content-Type: "application/json"
  Idempotency-Key: "{{ type }}-{{ now().strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H') }}"

Independently of that, a reading with the same type, timestamp and source as an existing row is refused with a 409 — so a duplicate push is a visible error rather than a duplicated data point.

When it stops working

Response	What it means
401	The token is wrong, revoked, or expired. Mint a new one.
403	The endpoint is outside the token's scope — check you are calling one of the two above and not a read — or the operator has switched the API off instance-wide.
409	A reading with this type, timestamp and source already exists.
422	The payload is wrong: an unknown type, a non-numeric value, an unavailable sensor state, or an entry naming APPLE_HEALTH.
429	Too many requests. The batch route allows 60 calls per minute.

The response envelope is { "data": ..., "error": null } on success and { "data": null, "error": "<message>" } on failure, so logging error from the body will usually say exactly what was wrong.