I have a question regarding creating value templates. I am looking to build a few REST based sensors, where the API calls return some pretty complicated JSON data I need to parse and extract the value I want from. Does anyone have any tips on how I might sandbox/test my templates without having to go through the entire HA component interface?
Ah great, yes so I can just define a variable and play with it there that’s useful.
I think I might just bail out of HA entirely though and use command line sensors to pull data. I don’t see the point in having to learn a whole new template engine for a complex task I can reproduce very quickly with a shell script. Any reason that’s a bad idea?