Option two: Collapsible sections with large headings
A collection of posts on how to perform common tasks and deal with common problems.
This guide is intended for those new to Home Assistant, those that are struggling to find answers on a particular subject, and those in troubleshooting mode.
Most links are to posts in Community Guides
indicates a link to Home Assistant documentation
indicates a link to an external website
CTRL + F to search
Getting Started With The Forum
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Discourse New User Guide
This forum uses Discourse software
Hands-on practical courses to learn Discourse commands
Two courses taught by the Discourse discobot
How to help us help you
How to ask a good question
How to help us help them
How to give a good answer
Tips on community searching
Looking for answers and duplicate topics in the forum
Custom search links for frequent searchers
Shortcuts to save repeatedly typing the same thing into the search toolbar
Formatting YAML in forum posts
Using the preformatted text tool
Adding links to forum posts
Preview blocks and linking to particular posts
Getting help in languages other than English
This is an English language forum, but there are others
How to share automations and scripts
Making it easy for others to read and copy them
Getting Started With HA
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Awesome Home Assistant
An overview
Introduction to Home Assistant and the official documentation
A personal view
Twenty things I wish I knew when I started with Home Assistant
And another one…
Basic common Home Assistant tasks
Tips on searching the docs
Using the search box
Integrations, add-ons and custom integrations
How they differ, what they do
Disaster recovery planning
What could possibly go wrong?
Installation
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Beginner
Advanced
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Installing Home Assistant OS using Proxmox 8
Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS SCALE
Installing Home Assistant on VMWare Player / Workstation 16 (or 17)
Database
Configuration
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Automations
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How and why to avoid device IDs in automations and scripts
Using entity IDs and states
Automations #1: The trigger
Triggers only fire when they change from false to true
Automations #2: The condition block
The function of the condition block is to stop the automation
Turning lights on and off at sunrise and sunset
Example of a motion activated lights automation
Automations - from zero to hero
A step by step guide
Annotating automations and scripts
Extra keys not allowed @ data[‘xxxx’]
What does it mean?
Backups
Click to expand
Frontend
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Themes
Defining the look of your dashboards
This entity does not have a unique ID
What it means, and how to fix it
Easy date and time card
Using only markdown
Read-only sensor display
Without templates
Integrations
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Weather integrations
The definitive guide
Notifications
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How to make notifications more informative
Adding device names and timestamps
Templating
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What the heck is a template?
And how can I use it?
How to read a template in yaml
The why and how of all those delimiters
What’s with all the curly brackets?
Template Delimiters and Whitespace Control.
Getting time and date with templates
A trigger based template sensor to store global variables
A trigger based template sensor to retrieve last change of an entity
YAML Anchors
Re-use code and shorten your templates
Sample templates basic to exotic
From one of the HA Devs
Useful Conditions
Are all entities inside a domain equal to a state?
Apples, Oranges and Bananas
How to insert “and” between the last two items in a list
Replacement for UK Met Office integration
The API for the existing integration closes down this year
YAML
Hardware
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Energy Monitoring
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Basic energy monitoring
Understanding energy and power
Utility meter tariffs
How to use them to conditionally measure things
Availability templates
Their importance for energy template sensors
Monitoring energy by device category
And calculating running averages
Voice Assistants
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Overview
Voice in Home Assistant
How to launch an Alexa skill from Home Assistant
Talking about the Weather
Fixing typical pronunciation problems
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Technologies
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AI
Click to expand
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant tools
Bluetooth
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About Bluetooth…
Understanding Home Assistant’s capabilities
List of compatible Bluetooth adapters
Getting the IRK for your phone
Tracking Android and Apple devices
Flashing a Bluetooth proxy
Extend your Bluetooth range
Enhancing device tracking with the Bayesian integration
Which room are you probably in?
ESPHome
Click to expand
SSH
Click to expand
Tasmota
Click to expand
Zigbee
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Is Zigbee right for you?
What Zigbee is good at and what it does less well
Zigbee buyer’s guide
Do your research!
Migrating from a Philips Hue bridge to ZHA
A step by step guide
Where can I find a list of supported devices?
Zigbee network optimization
A how-to guide for avoiding radio frequency interference + adding Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable Zigbee network mesh with best possible range and coverage by fully utilizing Zigbee mesh networking
Quirks
How to set up custom device handlers in ZHA
Mains-powered devices that are not routers
Not many people know that
Facts about Zigbee
A to Zig
A Zigbee glossary
Database of Zigbee devices supported by ZHA, Z2M and others
Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) supported devices
How to handle ZHA devices stuck in “Interview Complete. Configuring”
Z-Wave
Troubleshooting
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Troubleshooting your configuration
Troubleshooting the companion app
How To Share a Debug Trace
Essential when asking for help with automations or scripts
How to Troubleshoot your Rasberrry PI Crashing
How to Get to Your Log After Restart / Restore
Retrieving your log from the system journal
Target selector & entity selector errors
What does “Message malformed” mean?
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Tracking Down Instability Issues Caused by Integrations
How to set DNS after first install
When Home Assistant can not obtain an IPv4 address
For More Experienced Users
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Automations: trigger_variables
Automations: how to disable a trigger on the fly
Yaml: How to read configuration errors
Template select entities
Template selects create an entity that acts like an input select helper in the front end
Blueprints - get your !input value into a template
How to set a custom scan Interval
How to add custom buttons to the side toolbar
Read-only sensor helper display without templates
How to use context
Telling whether it was an automation, a physical device or a dashboard that changed an entity
Contributing to the Project
Contributors
New posts in this series (or improvements to existing ones - each post is a wiki) are welcome.
For this series we are limiting topics to items directly related to Home Assistant Core & Frontend, and not individual Custom Integrations, Custom Themes, Dashboard Items, Add-ons or Blueprints. Consider starting other lists for those.
Join the cookbook discussion if you have any questions or want to contribute in other ways.
- Make a post in Community Guides and tag it with
cookbook. - Include a link to this index
- Add a link from this index
Be aware that posts can be edited by anyone.