I have been a Home Assistant user since 0.38.4 and I believe that I have just upgraded and upgraded and upgraded to where I am now at the latest version. Everything works as I want it to but I worry about under the hood. I just did an 85 to 90 update and I had a lot of Configuration “breaks” which I was able to resolve (optimistic and retain entries mostly).
At any rate I’d like to try a new install but I have some concerns. First concern is that I have one configuration yaml file, just one, and it’s about 1200 lines long now. I have TONS of stuff in my house and lots of automations. I think I have another yaml file (known devices) for device tracking my iPhone. And I have a lot of Zwave stuff which is controlled by the Aeotec 5th gen USB stick.
Is starting with a fresh install going to be an ENORMOUS pain or is it going to be easier than I thought? I’m interested in trying the new interface as well but I have the cards or whatever they called them.
Here’s what mine looks like. Any help or recommendations appreciated.
I’m not really sure what you would be gaining by starting over from scratch?
If you are concerned about any potential “fluff” in your configuration then I think your best bet to get it under control would be to split your config using !include statements then you can go thru and weed out any possibly unnecessary stuff.
But…If everything is working and you aren’t getting errors that tells me that there isn’t that much extraneous stuff in your config that a small bit of housekeeping couldn’t resolve.
Keeping up with breaking changes kind of forces you to make your modifications as the new versions come out so the worst that could happen besides just duplicated/unused components is that you have a bunch of commented out lines. And those are easily dealt with.
Having a bunch of running automations and a large z wave network just means that you will still end up with a very similar configuration in the end and the only thing to show for your work is just the experience of rebuilding an already running system.
which new “interface” are referring to? hassio? lovelace in general or configuring lovelace thru the gui?
Interested in trying lovelace. This weekend I may write a new SD card from my backup and activate it and see what it looks like. Worried about how it will interface with the old style “Cards” that are written.
I wasn’t aware that there were any “cards” that were used in the old states-ui.
As far as I know everything was configured using group-views and groups in those views. At least that’s the way mine was.
If you are already on the latest version of HA you are likely already using lovelace but just don’t know it since it’s been default for a few versions already.
“cards” may be the wrong word. Tabs or pages or whatever they are
I see where I can turn Lovelace on I just have never done it and want to make sure I can go back. And of course it is easy enough to go back because all I have to do is burn another SD card. Even though you can do this all free I paid for an EXCELLENT program called SD Clone. Every time I make a change to my config I shut the pi down for 5 minutes and copy the card. (edited to add: I have no less than 15 pi’s in my home doing various things. SD Clone is a huge timesaver and hard drive space saver).
I have a LOT of stuff in my house and all manner of interfaces. The thought of tampering with it too much and taking it all down is a disturbing thought to me.
I have also the Aeotec 5th gen zwave stick. From my experience it works OK if inserted to a clean install. But if you have customized the entries those will change back to defaults (e.g. entity ID). And it might take time for you to figure out which is which in case you would have multiple same sensors.
Few of the zwave devices I had to unpair and pair again. These appeared as new devices with increased node_id: index. I have no idea what happens to “old” index, it is not showing up in HA. But the stick might have something in the memory, don’t know.
And you always copy the .storage and .data folders to new install?
Okay…I saw the UI Control thing and maybe misunderstood it. I based my “desktop” off of cards or tabs or groups or whatever they are called back in the 0.50 era or so and my desktop has looked the same since then. I have a pretty large home automation going on here but never threw myself deep enough in the community terminology and such I guess.
I’m content with the look of the UI especially since I kind of configured it in the way that I wanted so this is all good news. Just contemplating a clean install. Running Hassbian. I don’t want to go through all the zwave devices and rewrite large gobs of configuration.yaml.
As huge as the file is getting I kind of like having it all in one file because I have to give less thought to finding stuff to fix.
I used HA for years and got to this “This is all I’m going to do point” and just didn’t really mess with it for ages except to update occasionally. Then I discovered 433 MHz devices, Then Sonoff’s then Tasmota and reed switches and automated my garage door…In short I’ve added a bunch of stuff recently and upgraded and while everything is working fine I’m worried about future proofing things.
I actually went ahead and did a hass io installation. I was running Hassbian before.
For the most part it went pretty smooth. I copied over all the pertinent files to the hass io install and really about the only thing that went wrong was that about 10 or 15 devices got an extra _ added. Easy enough to search out in configuration.yaml and change. Also had to enable some integrations such as Nest, LIFX, Owntracks, etc. Really only took an hour or two to clean it all up nice.
I kind of like the hass io add-ons and such. I kind of feel future proofed for the time being and of course I have the Hassbian SD card still and a back up of it as well so I can go back if anything gets goofy.
I feel like it was worth it and not as hard as I thought.
i just did the same thing.
i love the gui of lovelace who is really easy to make cards .
repair broken things is also more easy because we now exactly what is broken and where are the broken stuff.
but, it meens that some old file and config are not used anymore.
In the idea to have a “clean” install, is there somewhere a list of things (like group) that aren’t used anymore with lovelace and that can be simply deleted ?
