Hi everyone,
I’m a total newcomer to Home Assistant (only one week in!), coming from a robust self-hosted Docker environment. I’m eager to learn and contribute to this amazing community.
Recently, I experienced a frustrating issue that heavily impacted my learning curve. I had a flawless automation for a ZRC-90 remote (8 buttons, 4 states each). Out of nowhere, button 4 stopped responding. After rebuilding it in the visual editor to no avail, I dived into the raw code and discovered that Home Assistant dumps all rules into a single automations.yaml file.
Inside that massive file, I found a duplicated “ghost” code snippet for button 4 that was completely invisible from the UI. This corrupt block was causing the conflict. Since I don’t master YAML yet, my only safe option was to back up, delete everything, and start from scratch.
While searching for a solution, I found out about the !include_dir_list tweak. However, this completely locks you out of the visual editor, forcing users to manually type code—which is far from ideal for those of us who prefer a UI-driven workflow.
Proposed Solution:
A highly viable, cost-effective, and seamless way to solve this would be a hybrid approach. The system could maintain the main automations.yaml file acting as a central index or orchestrator. Instead of dumping thousands of lines of raw code there, the visual editor would just append a reference link inside it pointing to the individual file, like this:
yaml
- !include automations/mando_ZRC-90.yaml
- !include automations/Piscina_AUTO.yaml
This way, Home Assistant loads everything into memory sequentially just as it does now, retaining full compatibility with the Visual Editor, while users get the safety and organization of isolated, standalone files per automation to prevent massive file corruption.
Thanks for your hard work!