Here is an easy feature to implement that would be extremely helpful to many people.
CURRENT STATE:
Whenever I go to restart Home Assistant, I go to the Developer Tools → YAML section, I always click the “Check Configuration” button, and then I click the “Restart” button if everything is ok.
FUTURE STATE:
Any time a “restart” button is pressed, automatically do a background “check configuration” immediately, present a configuration warning dialog only if there is a configuration issue that would prevent restart, then show the “Are you sure” dialog box.
This future state will save me (and I’m sure many others) the extra step of manually hitting the check configuration button every time before restarting.
FWIW, I am still in the habit of executing Check Configuration after I have manually modified the configuration to ensure I didn’t introduce any malformed YAML. However I only do that if the next step is to reload an integration (like for Template Sensors). If I have to restart then, like tom_l explained, Home Assistant will automatically run Check Configuration prior to restarting.
Interesting! I had my test system recently freeze on restart after doing some experimental manual configurations. That result and YouTubers still saying to hit the “Check Configuration” button before “Restart” lead me to believe a restart could still happen with a broken config.
It’s good to know the double-failsafe is already in place!
The check configuration feature only checks the configuration.yaml and all the files merged in with include parameters.
You can mess up in other parts of HA and it will fail.
The check configuration also seems to allow some errors that will not prevent HA from restarting, but will result in errors and warnings in the log files.