November’s Home Assistant update is here, and Frenck wasn’t messing about. They’re calling 2026.11 the biggest release they’ve ever done, which usually means either wonderful new toys or three hours spent trying to figure out why a template sensor is screaming at us in the logs.
Since you can read the official changelog yourself, I’m just going to scrape off the fluff and look at what actually matters for the lab: HACS moving into core, target exclusions finally arriving, and a massive naming overhaul that’s going to require some light swearing on your dashboards.
HACS is Now the Marketplace
If you’ve been running Home Assistant for more than five minutes, you already know HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store). Up until now, getting community cards, themes, and custom integrations meant jumping through a few hoops and installing an extra component manually.
Well, faff no more. HACS is officially part of core now, rebranded as the Marketplace and tucked neatly under Settings. When your container or OS instance updates, it migrates everything over automatically. Your installed repos carry across, you don’t need a GitHub account just to grab a custom theme, and installing a new custom integration drops you straight into the config flow instead of making you restart twice.
Is it community code? Yes. Does it pop up a warning telling you not to blame the core devs when a dodgy card breaks your UI? Also yes. But having it built-in makes life significantly easier.
Target Exclusions (At Long Last)
Here’s a small quality-of-life win that feels about five years overdue. Up until today, if you wanted to target an entire floor or area in an automation say, turning off every light downstairs, you had to include the whole lot. If you wanted to leave the kitchen light on, your only option was abandoning the smart target and manually listing every single entity like some sort of medieval peasant.
Now, you can just hit Exclude target and pick what gets left out. Even better, it stays dynamic. Add a new smart bulb to the kitchen next week, and it automatically gets ignored by the downstairs sweep. Sensible, logical, and saves a lot of YAML bodging.
The Naming Overhaul: The Bit That Might Break Things
Now for the spicy part. Home Assistant has spent four years completely rethinking how entities get named. The theory is sound: you name a device or sensor once, and Home Assistant automatically stitches in the context (like area and device name) so you don’t have to spend your evenings maintaining rigid naming conventions.
The catch? It’s a proper breaking change.
When you boot up 2026.11, some of your dashboard cards are going to look slightly confused. Unnamed cards and badges will default to showing the device name followed by the entity name instead of whatever friendly name you bodged together three years ago. Your underlying entity IDs are safe, so your automations won’t randomly self-destruct, but expect to spend ten minutes cleaning up your Lovelace views.
Quick Bits Worth Knowing
- Automatic Dashboard Sections: You can now tell dashboard sections to populate themselves automatically based on device or entity types, saving you from manually dragging cards around every time you add a sensor.
- Actually Useful Debugging: The activity panel has a
Triggered byfilter now, integration log banners have a direct button to tail logs live, and automation traces link straight across script calls. No more digging through raw timestamps. - Matter Cameras & Local Storage: Matter 1.5 brings native camera streams over WebRTC, and you can now mount a local USB or internal drive directly under Settings > System > Storage for your backups and media without mucking about with network shares.
Final Verdict
2026.11 is a massive update that fixes some proper long-standing annoyances, even if the naming changes mean a little bit of dashboard tidying. Take a backup before you hit update, check your Lovelace cards afterwards, and enjoy having HACS built right into the sidebar.