Installation

Requirements

• Home Assistant 2025.4 or newer, which can reach opendata.dwd.de over HTTPS.
• A location in Germany, or close to its border. See Grid cell lookup for what is covered.

No account or API key is needed.

How you install depends on your Home Assistant version: from Home Assistant 2026.11 on, community integrations come from the Marketplace, which is built in. Before that, they came from HACS, which you installed yourself.

Install from the Marketplace (Home Assistant 2026.11 and newer)

1. Open DWD Precipitation in the Marketplace with this button:

   

   Or go to Settings > Marketplace and search for DWD Precipitation. The first time you open the Marketplace, it asks you to accept a warning that community content is not checked by the Home Assistant project.

2. Select Install, check the version, and select Install again.

3. The setup opens by itself when the installation is done. No restart is needed. If you closed it, add the integration yourself.

Updates appear under Settings > Updates, next to the updates of Home Assistant itself, with the release notes. After you install one, restart Home Assistant; a repair under Settings > System > Repairs reminds you and can restart it for you. A new release can take a few hours to show up there, because the Marketplace only checks the catalog for new versions every few hours.

Coming from HACS

If you installed DWD Precipitation with HACS, there is nothing to do: when Home Assistant 2026.11 starts for the first time, the Marketplace takes over everything HACS installed. DWD Precipitation stays installed, keeps its settings and entities, and keeps getting updates.

Install with HACS (Home Assistant 2026.10 and older)

If you do not have HACS yet, install it first.

1. Open DWD Precipitation in HACS with this button:

   

   Or open HACS and search for DWD Precipitation.

2. Select Download.

3. Restart Home Assistant.

4. Add the integration.

HACS shows a notification when a new version is out; update from there and restart Home Assistant again.

Manual installation

1. Download dwd_precipitation.zip from the latest release.
2. Create the folder /config/custom_components/dwd_precipitation/ in your Home Assistant configuration directory and extract the zip into it. The zip has no folder of its own: its files go straight into that folder.
3. Restart Home Assistant.
4. Add the integration.

To update, empty that folder and extract the zip of the new release into it. A manual installation is not updated automatically.

Restart Home Assistant

After installing with HACS or by hand, and after every update, Home Assistant needs a restart to load the new code (Settings > System > Restart). Only a first installation from the Marketplace works without one.

Add the integration

Use this button:

Or add it yourself:

1. Go to Settings > Devices & services.
2. Select Add integration and search for DWD Precipitation.
3. Enter a name and pick the location. See Configuration for both.

The sensors fill in within a few minutes: each DWD product is fetched once at startup and then whenever DWD publishes a new file.

Removing the integration

1. Go to Settings > Devices & services > DWD Precipitation, open the entry's menu and select Delete. This also deletes the integration's stored data, such as the rain events record.
2. Remove the code as well:
   • Marketplace: when you delete the last entry, Home Assistant asks whether to uninstall DWD Precipitation too. You can also uninstall it later from its page in the Marketplace (three dots menu, then Uninstall). The Marketplace does not uninstall it while an entry still exists, and offers Delete and uninstall instead. If Home Assistant still has it loaded, a repair asks you to restart.
   • HACS: remove it in HACS, then restart Home Assistant.
   • Manual installation: delete the custom_components/dwd_precipitation folder, then restart Home Assistant.