Connect HA to a local MQTT server? Please help

Configuration
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I built a new Home Assistant system on a Raspberry Pi 3. No sweat. I then followed the instruction here Installing the Mosquitto MQTT Server to the Raspberry Pi - Pi My Life Up and made the Raspberry a MQTT server. When I tested the server, it worked fine. I then followed the instructions here GitHub - KmanOz/KmanSonoff: Firmware for ESP8266 based itead Sonoff switches for use with HomeAssistant / mqtt (which I have done before, but was using an external MQTT server) and programmed a SOnOff S20 wall plug. When I plugged the wall plug into the wall, I looked at CloudTrax and saw the device. Thus far, everything seems to be okay.

But, I have no idea how to ‘connect’ the device to the Home Assistant system! My goal is to connect it, then test it, before installing. Please provide some pointers. (One article suggested editing Hass.io, but I just did a search and could not find that file.) If it matters, I can post the contents of KmanSonoff/arduino/KmanSonoff_v1.00sc/config_sc.h if seeing those matter.

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The instructions to connect Home Assistant to an MQTT broker can be found here:

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After you get HA connected to your broker I would recommend using Tasmota instead of any other MQTT specific based firmware.

You can set it up for automatic discovery if you don’t want to mess with manually configuring each device in HA.

Or even ESPHome and forego the MQTT broker entirely.

Almost all of my ESP based devices are using ESPHome.

I still have a few ArduinoIDE based ESP8266 sensors that I can’t easily switch to ESPHome (more custom stuff) and 2 Tasmota devices (iFan03) but ESPHome using the API instead of MQTT just works really well.

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123 Tara – thanks for the pointer. Using your link, I found this link http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/mosquitto-tls/ and followed the instructions shown carefully. I then ran systemctl and saw that the mosquitto service is running. I then ran a test akin to that shown here Installing MQTT Broker(Mosquitto) on Raspberry Pi : 4 Steps - Instructables and saw that the service is running properly.

My issue is this: This article MQTT - Home Assistant shows changes to be made to the configuration.yaml. I cannot figure out what value to enter on the broker line. Also, per the instructions I followed, which step contains the username and password to be used? If you need more information to help me, just ask. Thanks!

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It’s the IP address of the machine that is hosting the MQTT Broker. I believe that in your case it’s the same machine that is hosting Home Assistant.