Hey everyone, I’m writing my progress as I go in an excel doc to try to stay on top of things and I’m coming to the end of my getting started section and am wondering if there’s anything I’m missing that others would consider essential steps. What I have so far is the following:
Set Up Your Devices
It’s easier to have them all set up and ready to be configured in advance
Prepare your network
Reserve your device IPs for both home assistant and the devices you wish to add to it so they don’t change.
Password Manager
Home Assistant will almost certainly involve multiple passwords, you should be using a password manager for these, if not then start now.
Install Home Assistant
This section links to the various ways to install home assistant, I’m sure we’ve all done it already.
Onboarding
Make sure to enter your name, a username in lower case and your real location. The later is important for geolocation automations later on. The analytics page is personal preference.
Dark Mode and Advanced Mode
Set these up from your profile options, advanced mode is required for several guides and is all but essential.
Check your Time and elevation units
Under both profile options and general settings, make sure these are correct for your home, they are relevant to location based automations. You can find your elevation here
Create a Home Assistant Backup
Do this now so you have a backup of a fresh installation with just your basic user settings saved.
Integration Housekeeping
Home Assistant will automatically detect some of your devices and establish a naming scheme early to make things cleaner later on.
Time and Date
Whilst templating can be used to get what this information provides, I find it easier to reference.
Uptime
This informs of how long Home Assistant has been up which his handy for templates later on
Terminal and SSH
You need this in case you lock yourself out, use putty or your program of choice to check that you can access it before moving on. For supervised users this can be found in the addons store
Studio Code Server
An easy way to edit and view your yaml which you will need to do from time to time and is found in the addons store. An alternative is Editor.
Clean up your configuration files and understand the secrets file
I recommend going into studio code server know and cleaning up your configuration, i sort my yaml files by A-Z and make sure you understand secrets, you’ll be using it later.
Install Hacs
This is the home assistant community store addon so you can install numerous integrations that are not found in native Home Assistant.
System Monitoring
These sensors allow you to monitor your Home Assistant instance usage where you can set up notify alerts later on
Add Users
Add your users and their respective photos for future use
Enable 2FA
This is very important especially if you want to have access to your Home Assistant away from home
Download the Home Assistant App
You can link this to your internal or a public instance to control your home from one app on the phone
Install Samba Share
I consider this essential as it gives you windows / mac access to your Home Assistant files, again found in the addons store.
Automated Home Assistant Backups
You want to get automatic backups set up. I use my NAS and also Google Drive, put a password on these!
Local Calendar
Whilst you’re sorting your backups, make sure to schedule a reminder to test that they’re working for every few months
Custom Brand Icons
Who doesn’t want more entity icon options?? Getting this early on will save you from coming back and redoing work later
Improve your Home Zone
Home Zones are generally a little loose by default, head into your areas section and narrow it down a bit to better fit your home for geolocation automations.
Watchman
Watchman can alert you to any errors in scripts, automations, blueprints etc which willl prevent them from operating correctly
Create Modes and a Master Switch
I highly recommend creating both a Master Switch which you can apply to all automations conditions to prevent or allow them at the flick of a single switch, use a toggle helper for this. Furthermore house modes are also important, you can create a house mode dropdown helper and apply it to all automations. For me I have Active, Do Not Disturb, Event, Guest, Protected and Sleep Modes.
A quick overview
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Active: This allows all automations to function as per normal
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Do Not Disturb: TTS notifications are disabled, notifications are stil possible via phones.
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Event: Covers everything the do not disturb mode does but also disables automated motion and time based lighting automations to allow for custom lighting scenarios such as during parties or a late night project where I want the lights to be bright.
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Guest: This also builds on top of do not disturb mode by also switching the wall tablet to more simple interface and disables television notifications.
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Protected: This is my away mode, it shuts off all devices by default, disables TTS notifications, enables all alarms and also enables presence simulation
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Sleep: This shuts off all devices and turns any motion based lighting to a very low brightness. TTS notifications are also disabled.
Reserve your IP inside of Home Assistant
This is done under the network settings, set a static ip here too, it may not be nessesary but it might save you from a problem later on
Delayed Notifications
If you’re in a do not disturb or sleep state, you can have your text to speech notifications held and then played to you the moment you exit that state. To do this we take advantage of scripts and templates.
Create another back up
After checking your logs for errors, usually of the statistical variety given you should have changed a few variables in your set up for example I change GIB to GB in a few sensors, create a new backup using the Google Drive Backup addon we added earlier. I recommend setting these early backups to never delete so they can be referenced later.