I had a problem with my Broadlink automation’s not functioning after a problem with one of my access points. For whatever reason, my RM mini 3 decided to use my main router, instead of the one that is located less than two meters away, and the ip address changed.
I fixed the ip address in my configuration file, and even after a reboot I still couldn’t get it to turn anything on or off. I was looking around, and noticed the reload core function on the configuration page, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to try it. After reloading the core, my RM mini 3 started functioning the way it should again.
What if anything is the difference between a core reload and a reboot?
I know that if I make changes to my config.yaml and do a ‘reload core’, nothing seems to change. Those changes then DO take effect after a restart of HassIO.
I find it really inconvenient the need to restart HA every time I change something on the configuration file as it takes a lot of time. As I’m not a good programmer, I sometimes need several (hundreds) of reboots before I get something right, and it really gets on my nerves. Am I missing something? Would appreciate your suggestions
I use an HA installation virtualbox virtual machine on my PC to test all configuration changes before they get to my Pi. I still have to restart HA, for every change, but its much faster, and the configuration on my Pi continue to run until I get it right.
I also use appdaemon for automations, which automatically detects changes in files and reloads the appropriate app. I believe Node-Red does the same.
this is just what i was looking for! Could you please elaborate a bit how to set that up? I was on the verge of buying a second Pi to use as a development device, but this might be even easier and quicker.
Cheers,
Marius
If you have hardware that plugs in to the Pi, then you may have difficulties emulating that, but the basic steps are:
download and install virtualbox, which allows you to run virtual unix machines within your pc.
download a .iso image of your favourite unix distribuiton. If you don’t have a favourite, I recommend lubuntu as its fairly lightweight but still uses the very popular Ubuntu packages. There is also a desktop version of Raspbian on the raspberry Pi website, which I tried once. It may be less confusing if you are not used to Unix.
create a new virtualbox machine with the .iso image, and install Linux.
I normally create a clone at this point, in case I want to create a new VM at some point to do something else.
Install HA using a method closest to what you have on your Pi.
Figure out a method of transferring your configuration files from one machine to another. I use git via a remote repository to keep an offsite backup, but scp or even rsync would probably work.
I just tried this after adding a new customize statement. It did nothing. Had to restart to see the new customization.
Editing an existing customization did change after a core reload.
Another tip that I use which speeds up restarts is to run hass in a terminal window through SSH . If you run a terminal and ssh into the pi and run hass from command line, you can see the errors real time in the terminal window but also you can kill hass instantaneously with ctrl X and then just run HASS again for a quick restart. It doesn’t gracefully kill the components which might cause warning but you they go away with time. After you are done, run hass with --daemon so it runs in the background and close the terminal.
I’m not sure the method you are using to edit customizations, but if you use the frontend tool Sidebar > Configuration > Customization the edits are available immediately without any restarts or reloads.
If you edit the customize.yaml file directly you need to restart Home Assistant or Reload Core to see the changes.
I hear you. I am a software engineer and find tweaking/testing the configuration to be a huge pain. I feel like I am either doing something wrong or people have hours and hours of free time to burn on this stuff and they are okay with it.
Totally. I thought reload core meant that it was going to reload the config.yaml. And with Lovelace, the load core seems pointless since the customizations are reflected after refreshing the browser.