Global variables ? (or at least make phone change more simple)

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Hi All,

Hope someone can help me with this challenge.
I have a new phone and lots of automations sending me messages (to the phone)
As a result of the new phone, I have to change all these automations to use the new entity, which is quite some work , doable, but I want to prevent it in the future and also I feel It’s not the right way of settings things up.

I Was thinking about:

-Can I send the messages to a person instead of to a device ?
-Can I use something like a “global variable” in which I enter the entity name of my phone and use that in automations ? (so if phone changes, I only have to change it at one place)
-Can I rename the phone + all entities below it in bulk so it will use the same name as my old phone ?
-Any better suggestion you might have to solve this problem…

Looking forward to you suggestions…

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Setup a notify group (even if it’s just the one device) and use that. Then you have a single place to make the update.

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Just went through this earlier this year. Here’s what I did:

Rename your phone to something generic like vincent_phone so you won’t have to change anything in the future.

Next, open up automations.yaml in your favourite text editor & do a search & replace for your old phone entity.

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