Home Assistant has released version 2.0 of the Home Assistant Community Store, or HACS. HACS 2.0 brings a new look and faster downloads, as promised by Home Assistant.

The Home Assistant smart home platform creates many of its own integrations, but it also allows users to create their own integrations and widgets. These integrations and widgets are offered in the free and open source Home Assistant Community Store. Users can share their code by submitting their GitHub repository to HACS.

HACS version 2 includes a new dashboard, Home Assistant reports advertisementThis dashboard now looks more like the Home Assistant panel itself and includes options for filtering, grouping, sorting, and searching.

According to Home Assistant, HACS 2.0 also comes with faster downloads. Previously, the platform only used GitHub to retrieve information such as file locations and ratings. To speed up this process, a remote dataset has been created, which is stored in Cloudflare R2 clusters. This dataset is updated regularly, so that the GitHub API doesn’t have to be called every time a user requests information. “Files will still be downloaded from GitHub and their API will still be accessible, but they will see far fewer requests, and the speed improvement will be huge,” Home Assistant said.

The last major change to HACS revolves around updates and fixes to integrations and UI elements. These will now appear in the same place as system updates and add-ons. The idea is that users no longer have to go to the HACS page every day.