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Recipe - Notify Whoever's Home, Fall Back to Everyone

Purpose

Send a notification only to the people currently home, each on their own device(s) - and if nobody's home, send it to everyone instead, so it still reaches someone. Make the config as easy as possible, don't make list everybody and their devices every time.

Implementation

Two Deliveries, both automatically getting their lists of targets the normal way from known recipients (either automatically discovered from Home Assistant and/or manually defined). This means not needing to either name a person or a device, so this scales to any number of recipients with no further config:

  • occupancy: only_in
  • narrows the recipient list down to just whoever's home. Unlike any_in (which is true if anyone's home, but still resolves to everyone), only_in genuinely narrows which recipients the delivery reaches - see Delivery Inclusion.
  • occupancy: all_out
  • Does the same the other way round - it resolves to everyone, but only when every recipient is away.

Note that inclusion: fallback plays no part in this - see the warning below.

Example Configuration

supernotify:
  recipients:
    - person: person.alex
    - person: person.sam
  delivery:
    notify_home:
      transport: mobile_push
      inclusion:
        - scenario
      occupancy: only_in
    notify_everyone:
      transport: mobile_push
      inclusion:
        - scenario
      occupancy: all_out
  scenarios:
    presence_routed:
      alias: "Notify whoever's home"
      delivery:
        notify_home:
        notify_everyone:

Add a third recipient and both deliveries pick it up automatically - nothing else changes.

Variations

One specific device per person, not all of them

occupancy: only_in narrows which recipients a delivery reaches, not which of a person's own registered devices get notified - if someone has two phones, both get the notification. To pin a delivery to one named device per person instead, drop the shared notify_home delivery and give each person their own, with target_usage: fixed and a bare mobile_app_id target (see Explicit Targets):

  delivery:
    notify_alex:
      transport: mobile_push
      inclusion:
        - scenario
      target_usage: fixed
      target:
        - mobile_app_alex_primary
      conditions:
        condition: state
        entity_id: person.alex
        state: home

This doesn't scale the way the occupancy-only version does - a new recipient needs their own delivery block - but it's the only way to express "this one device, not that one".

inclusion: fallback would do nothing here - don't add it

It's tempting to also add fallback to notify_everyone's inclusion, since that's its role. Don't - it would be dead weight. fallback only wires a delivery into a separate mechanism that fires when nothing at all delivered for the whole notification, and only adds a delivery that isn't already selected some other way. notify_everyone is already named directly in the scenario's own delivery: map, so it's always selected via plain scenario inclusion - the fallback mechanism never gets a chance to act, since there's nothing left for it to add. All the actual gating here is occupancy: all_out; strip that out while keeping inclusion: fallback and the delivery would fire on every notification, not just when nobody's home - naming a delivery directly always selects it, regardless of any fallback flag. See Delivery Inclusion for the full explanation.