Add-on translations also for environment vars when creating own Add-on

[amaciuc]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

Hi team,

I am writing you about a feature request. I am sorry that I use the issue form for asking a feature request, but it passed more than 1 month since I wrote on Community Forum, here is the link, and until now I haven't received an answer.

I am asking a way to pass values of environment variables through UI for an Add-on like we can do for options.
Here is my description wrote on community:

I have started to create my own several Add-ons but without building the docker image. I preferred to have an Add-on like you would deploy a docker container: a base image from docker io, mapping some dirs for persistency, bind tcp ports and passing several environments.
All of these could be made according to Add-on Configuration documentation (with a small mention regarding to binding dirs by using map, but that would be another discussion).
I started to need a way to pass values for environmemt variables from UI like it can be made for Options / Schema along with Add-on translations. I understand that this mechanism is created to pass options as variables inside the container and to be read with bashio module into an entrypoint script, but in my case I don't want to mess with building a new image as long as I can find a good enough image on docker io.
For example, here I already tried to pass somehow the options values to environment for my redis-stack Add-on. It ends up without interpreting the yaml, therefore my envs won't have the values of options, just a plain text like it appears starting with line 36.

Maybe this can be made already and I didn't find yet how to do that. Could you guide me, guys ?

To be honest, that would be a nice feature if it doesn't exist yet.

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

Which operating system are you running on?

Home Assistant Operating System

Steps to reproduce the issue

There isn't a problem.

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

I don't have logs, it is just a request for an answer.

System information

System Information

version	core-2024.12.1
installation_type	Home Assistant OS
dev	false
hassio	true
docker	true
user	root
virtualenv	false
python_version	3.13.0
os_name	Linux
os_version	6.6.63-haos
arch	x86_64
timezone	Europe/Bucharest
config_dir	/config

Home Assistant Community Store

GitHub API	ok
GitHub Content	ok
GitHub Web	ok
GitHub API Calls Remaining	4998
Installed Version	1.34.0
Stage	running
Available Repositories	1566
Downloaded Repositories	36

Home Assistant Cloud

logged_in	false
can_reach_cert_server	ok
can_reach_cloud_auth	ok
can_reach_cloud	ok

Home Assistant Supervisor

host_os	Home Assistant OS 14.0
update_channel	stable
supervisor_version	supervisor-2025.03.2
agent_version	1.6.0
docker_version	27.2.0
disk_total	116.7 GB
disk_used	81.4 GB
healthy	true
supported	true
host_connectivity	true
supervisor_connectivity	true
ntp_synchronized	true
virtualization
board	generic-x86-64
supervisor_api	ok
version_api	ok
installed_addons	Studio Code Server (5.14.2), Mosquitto broker (6.4.0), Home Assistant Google Drive Backup (0.112.1), AdGuard Home (5.0.1), ESPHome Device Compiler (2024.11.3), Zigbee2MQTT (2.1.3-1), Cloudflared (5.2.7), Samba share (12.3.2), Portainer (2.19.1), Whisper (1.0.0), Piper (1.4.0), Squeezelite (0.0.17), openWakeWord (1.8.2), VLC (0.2.0), Logitech Media Server (8.3.1.57), Uptime Kuma (0.12.4), Network UPS Tools (0.13.0), Filebrowser (2.23.0_14), ESPresense Companion (1.0.3), Samba NAS (12.3.2-nas), go2rtc (1.9.7), Frigate (Full Access) (0.14.1), HDD Tools (1.1.0), Terminal & SSH (9.16.0), Redis Stack (7.4.0-v1), ClamAV (1.4.1_base), MariaDB (2.7.2), Nextcloud (30.0.4), Advanced SSH & Web Terminal (20.0.0), ONLYOFFICE Document Server (8.2), Double Take (1.13.11.8), CodeProject AI.Server (CPU) (2.9.7)

Dashboards

dashboards	2
resources	26
views	14
mode	storage

Recorder

oldest_recorder_run	September 5, 2023 at 8:36 AM
current_recorder_run	March 4, 2025 at 8:40 PM
estimated_db_size	39638.70 MiB
database_engine	sqlite
database_version	3.45.3

Sonoff

version	3.5.4 (a4a8c5f)
cloud_online	0 / 7
local_online	2 / 2
debug	failed to load:

Supervisor diagnostics

No response

Additional information

No response

[mdegat01]

So I get what youre trying to do with the environment bit. My experience has been making existing images into add-ons isn't typically this simple but I guess the changes to the map option to allow you to choose the name within the container makes this more feasible at times. That's doable but I'd have to think about how to handle it because your example would be a breaking change, since its possible (albeit unlikely) a user wanted the text [REDISTIMESERIES_ARGS] as their env value.

I'm not understanding your add-on translation use case though. Add-on translations are used for providing language specific translations to the static documentation around options and such. Why would you need to substitute user-entered data in?

Btw if you are comfortable in python you're welcome to submit a PR for one or both of these. I can review and help get it in.

[amaciuc]

I'm not understanding your add-on translation use case though. Add-on translations are used for providing language specific translations to the static documentation around options and such

I assumed that using translations would be the key for injecting values from UI to environment (like it happens with options).

Why would you need to substitute user-entered data in?

Like I tried in the Redis Add-on, they offer the possibility for defining arguments for multiple components, here is the doc. So, that means I would like offering to end user a way for injecting these values.

Another example where triggered me the need for opening this request is onlyoffice document server. I want this for local documents editor in Nextcloud. I made my own add-on for it, but check this link, at section Available configuration parameters. They have, let's say, a lot of enviroment variables. Most of these could have static values like I did here, but the one that bothered me is JWT_SECRET, link. This one should be defined as unique by each end user and it is mandatory for a right connection between nextcloud and onlyoffice.

So, that being said, I try finding a way to inject values from UI to envs when the container is deployed.

Do you try to say that I could implement support for this in python? I am okay with that if you could guide me a little how I can prepare a developing env, maybe some docs / links.

[mdegat01]

I assumed that using translations would be the key for injecting values from UI to environment (like it happens with options).

Just to clarify, when you say "translations" then you mean these right? The JSON files you put in a folder called translations within the folder for your add-on that provides a mapping of text to translated text for a given language? Those are only used by the Home Assistant frontend to translate names and descriptions of options your add-on has into the users language. They are not used at runtime by addons or included in the addon's container at all.

Or at least Supervisor doesn't, as an addon developer you're obviously welcome to include whatever you want in the published image for your addon. But Supervisor will not do anything to make these translations available in the container at runtime. It believes the only consumer is the Home Assistant frontend, not the addon itself.

Like I tried in the Redis Add-on, they offer the possibility for defining arguments for multiple components, here is the doc. So, that means I would like offering to end user a way for injecting these values.

Yea this all makes sense to me. Currently we expect add-on developers to make their own images for add-ons and use scripts that run at start of the container to map add-on options into envs if that is what is needed. You can see a rudimentary example of how this works in the example add-on here

But your idea of referencing options in envs defined in environment makes sense to me. I'd have to think about how to do it without breaking backwards compatibility though.

Do you try to say that I could implement support for this in python? I am okay with that if you could guide me a little how I can prepare a developing env, maybe some docs / links.

We do have a guide for getting started on Supervisor development here. It's not too different then core development except a much smaller code base with much less throughput in terms of PRs. You'd probably want to look at this and this. The first is Supervisor's object representing an addon you have installed, the second is an object representing how an installed addon is translated into a Docker container.