that link holds a dead link to a Dutch forum…
https://www.meetup.com/home-assistant-Netherlands/
seems to not exist (I didnt look for an existing link as the main site is unknown to me)
Removed.
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Anybody have a strong opinion about which sub-heading this should go under in the index?
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Troubleshooting?
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I’ve just updated my recroder wrangling guide, How to reduce your database size and extend the life of your SD card to include this very helpful addon fro HAOS users, Dbstats - Addon for database usage analytics but noticed my topic was not in the cookbook. This one is instead: How to keep your recorder database size under control
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Should we consolidate the best bits from the various guides (there’s this one as well: Taming the Recorder) into one guide?
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If not, why is the most comprehensive guide (IMH that’s mine
) not in the cookbook?
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I’m good with you presenting it any way you want. There’s always room for more links. Just be sure to use the []() formatting BC we used up the automatic ones provided by Discourse.
As the author of the other guide… I haven’t been able to update it. Real life has been busy, and Home Assistant fell down in the priorities.
I’d be glad to have a combined (and updated) guide with all the best practices and solutions. I know most of my SQL queries are not valid anymore, and people have contributed with variations further down in that topic.
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I’d be in favor of consolidating the guides and marking the other one as deprecated with a link to the one which is actively maintained.
You’re guide is not in the cookbook because someone hasn’t added it. Feel free to do so.
Anyone want to pass comment on this one or suggest a better one. Looking to add it or similar to the cookbook.
HTTPS access is missing I think from the cookbook, and the question comes up here and Discord. I’d like to have a good link in the cookbook to drop on people.
I’m thinking configuration - Integrations…
I use NC, so I cannot really comment.
True, although more topics on the subject might lead to a link explosion and it treads into networking territory, which is a tricky one to handle. Just my word of caution. Probably fine to try it and see how it goes.
I don’t want to deal with networking, but so many things require the https access, anything google, tts without NS and lots of others. When questions pop about nginx duckdns, etc.
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I sent someone the link for how to keep your recorder under control noting that the posts in the cookbook should for the most part reflect the most current documentation. They questioned this note at the top of the post
Note: This guide was written for an earlier version of Home Assistant (around 2021). Since then, changes have happened, but this guide hasn’t been updated (yet). Please be aware your Home Assistant version can be slightly different, and thus you need to adapt yourself the instructions from this guide.
Looking over the post, it looks to be up to date. I see that note was added in 2022 and it was edited 8 or 9 times after that. If the post is up to date, that note should probably be removed.
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It’s a Community Guide and therefore is editable.
Edit it if you feel it needs to be changed.
You appear to be up on that subject.
You can look at the past edits to ask the person that wrote that if that helps you decide.
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I’m really not. I’m a data hoarder and I’m sitting on 5 years of history. I know I can edit the post but I’ve never used anything in there, in practice. I don’t want to say it’s up to date because I am unsure.
Maybe use that?
The format of the cookbook is beginning to look a bit tired and offputting. I’ve revamped it a bit (see next post). What do people think?
I’ve made it a wiki so you can change/add things.
**Option One: ** Sections with background shading
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
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
Awesome Home Assistant
An overviewIntroduction to Home Assistant and the official documentation
A personal viewTwenty 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 boxIntegrations, add-ons and custom integrations
How they differ, what they doDisaster recovery planning
What could possibly go wrong?
Installation
Beginner
Advanced
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)
Home Assistant Core on Android Tablet
Database
How to keep your recorder database size under control
Migrate back from MariaDB to the default SQLite
Postgresql to SQLite migration, moving back to SQLite
Configuration
Automations
How and why to avoid device IDs in automations and scripts
Using entity IDs and statesAutomations #1: The trigger
Triggers only fire when they change from false to trueAutomations #2: The condition block
The function of the condition block is to stop the automationTurning lights on and off at sunrise and sunset
Example of a motion activated lights automation
Automations - from zero to hero
A step by step guideAnnotating automations and scripts
Extra keys not allowed @ data[‘xxxx’]
What does it mean?Backups
Alternatives to core automated backups
Frontend
Themes
Defining the look of your dashboardsThis entity does not have a unique ID
What it means, and how to fix itEasy date and time card
Using only markdownRead-only sensor display
Without templatesIntegrations
Weather integrations
The definitive guideNotifications
How to make notifications more informative
Adding device names and timestampsTemplating
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 delimitersWhat’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 templatesSample templates basic to exotic
From one of the HA DevsUseful 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 listReplacement for UK Met Office integration
The API for the existing integration closes down this yearYAML
Hardware
Blakadder Device Compatibility Repository
Energy Monitoring
Basic energy monitoring
Understanding energy and powerUtility meter tariffs
How to use them to conditionally measure thingsAvailability templates
Their importance for energy template sensorsMonitoring energy by device category
And calculating running averages
Voice Assistants
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
AI
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
Friday’s Party
Creating a private, agentic AI using voice assistant toolsBluetooth
About Bluetooth…
Understanding Home Assistant’s capabilitiesList of compatible Bluetooth adapters
Getting the IRK for your phone
Tracking Android and Apple devicesFlashing a Bluetooth proxy
Extend your Bluetooth rangeEnhancing device tracking with the Bayesian integration
Which room are you probably in?ESPHome
SSH
SSHing from a command line sensor or shell command
Tasmota
Zigbee
Is Zigbee right for you?
What Zigbee is good at and what it does less wellZigbee buyer’s guide
Do your research!Migrating from a Philips Hue bridge to ZHA
A step by step guideWhere 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 networkingQuirks
How to set up custom device handlers in ZHAMains-powered devices that are not routers
Not many people know that
Facts about ZigbeeA to Zig
A Zigbee glossaryDatabase 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
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
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 endBlueprints - 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
Editing the official documentation and creating a pull request on GitHub
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.
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One comment so far…
Long list is hard to parse
? Solutions…
- I’ve tried putting shading behind the sections to see whether that helps.
- CTRL+F can be used to search the list - that could be mentioned at the top. (It doesn’t work very well here in a thread, but in the Cookbook itself, which is a single post, it’s fine.)
- Put link text in bold to break up the wall of text
I liked it the way it was (before any changes) but definitely an OCD - acquired taste in the original form. I cringed when I saw the changes, but am willing to work with it if the group goes this way.
Speaking as the OP of the Cookbook Index, I have to say that I agree with @JackJourneyman.
The layout of the Index was originally based on “Help us to help you” - partly as a joke. In hindsight it wasn’t a good choice - they’re different animals.
“Help us to help you” is rarely edited. It has short, static sections with very few bullet points, so you don’t get the wall of text effect. The Index, by its very nature, has to be more flexible because people are adding to it all the time. It will need to be reordered occasionally - the numbered paragraphs make this quite difficult and I believe links to sections can also be a problem if the order is changed.
“Help us to help you” was posted in 2019. HA has grown considerably in six years and there are many more less-technical users than there used to be - people who may not often venture into forums like this. Visual expectations have changed, so that nowadays the long list of unordered sections and bullet points looks muddled and dated.
Whether we like it or not, it’s a fact of (online) life that people will use and trust a resource less if it looks uncared for, and the point of the Cookbook is that people should use it. It’s a resource not a repository.
Personally I think the suggested layout looks fresh and managed, particularly with the links in bold. Less sure about the shading of alternate sections. Perhaps we could see an example of the collapsing sections suggested by @parautenbach?
I have to say that the small number of comments on the suggested layout is disappointing. I make it two likes, plus one strongly anti comment and one cautiously pro. But hey, that’s life. Hundreds of people appear to be using the cookbook, so it’s worth persevering with.
Oh, and @Sir_Goodenough… “I cringed when I saw the changes” is not helpful.
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