Home Assistant 2026.11 folds HACS into a built-in Marketplace and rebuilds entity naming

Home Assistant 2026.11.0 is a large release, but the practical upgrade risk for homelab users concentrates in two changes, according to an analysis published on dev.to on 6 November: HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, is being folded into a built-in Marketplace, and entity naming has been overhauled in a backward-incompatible way.

The dev.to piece offers a simple rule: if you run few custom integrations and few cards or templates that depend on friendly names, upgrading now is reasonable with a backup and a review. If your dashboards are full of custom cards or templates that build text from names, waiting for the first patch is the prudent option.

HACS becomes the Marketplace

HACS is now integrated into Home Assistant as a Marketplace, found under Settings, and available on every installation type. Installing or updating through it no longer requires a GitHub account. The catalog is free and community-maintained; the Home Assistant project does not test, audit or support it, and it runs inside your instance.

Existing HACS users are migrated automatically at startup after the update. Installed items, custom repositories and update entities are preserved. But the standalone HACS installer stops in 2026.11, a separate installation is no longer possible, and the old version will receive no further releases. The dev.to author therefore recommends treating the migration as one-way and relying on your backup.

Operationally, installing from the Marketplace needs no restart, but updates still do, with a repair notification flagging when one is required. Custom repositories do require a GitHub connection through device login, limited to reading public information. The download source can also be switched to community-run Chinese mirrors, but the article warns that catalog data and installed code then pass through whoever operates the mirror, or through a third-party proxy if the mirror is unreachable, so only trusted sources should be chosen.

Entity names get rebuilt

The naming change breaks backward compatibility on the display side: some dashboard names will look different, above all for entities whose names do not start with the device name. If a name already begins with the device name, that prefix is dropped. If it does not, context is prepended — the article's example is a switch called Coffee machine on a device named Smart plug 3, which will now display as Smart plug 3 Coffee machine.

The fix for awkward names is to rename the device and enable the Main entity of the device option. Entities exposed to Assist, Alexa or Google Assistant keep their previous name as an alias, so voice commands should continue to work. Separately, complex devices are being split into child devices in Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome and some Tuya integrations, with Matter and ZHA still in progress — expect a longer device list after updating.

The sharpest risk sits with templates and custom cards. Anything using friendly_name may show names that differ from what built-in cards display. The recommended replacements are the entity_name(), device_name() and area_name() template functions; friendly_name remains for compatibility but is slated for deprecation. Crucially, entity IDs, automations, scripts, scenes and dashboards keep working — what changes is what you see, not what your automations point at.

What else is new

Two features might justify upgrading sooner. Automation targets can exclude entities, devices, areas, floors and labels, with the result recomputed on every run so items added later are covered. Dashboards gained automatic sections plus the ability to copy and paste sections between them. If you use neither area- or label-based targets nor section dashboards, the dev.to article argues these alone do not justify rushing.

An upgrade checklist

Before updating: take a backup stored off the device; read the backward-incompatible changes in every release note between your version and the target; locate custom cards and templates that rely on friendly_name; and confirm GitHub device login works if you depend on custom repositories. The CLI command is ha core update --backup.

After updating: check Settings > System > Repairs and the logs, where any restart notice appears; open the Marketplace in Settings and confirm your integrations, custom repositories and update entities survived the migration; sweep dashboards for changed names, fixing them by renaming devices and marking main entities; and verify automations still fire. The article also flags its own limits: it includes no data on Python or HA OS version requirements, and it was written before any post-launch incidents could be observed.

Why it matters

The end of the standalone HACS installer makes this migration effectively compulsory for anyone using community integrations: the old store receives no new versions, so staying put is not a stable long-term option. The naming overhaul touches the most visible layer of the product — what users read and say aloud — while leaving entity IDs untouched, which is why breakage is likely to be cosmetic but widespread. And by shipping unvetted community code in the core UI, the Marketplace turns source selection, including mirror choices, into an explicit trust decision every homelab owner now has to make.