Hey all,
I’ve been using a few shared blueprints from the forums and they’ve been super helpful! But now I’m thinking of creating my own blueprint from scratch to automate something a bit more specific in my setup.
Before I dive in, I was wondering:
- Are there any good resources or examples that explain the structure of a blueprint YAML file?
- What’s the difference between using a regular automation and converting that into a blueprint?
- Can we define multiple triggers or optional conditions in a custom blueprint?
I’m trying to automate some motion sensor logic with time constraints, but want it to be reusable with different entities later. Just don’t want to mess it up 
Any guidance, tips, or examples would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
HA Blueprint - Tutorial
HA Blueprint - YAML Schema
It’s not completely clear what you are asking here.
Creating a basic blueprint is usually only a little bit more complicated than configuring a similar automation in YAML. But, most of the time, for a blueprint to actually be useful it needs to be more flexible/dynamic than the original automation. That takes a higher level of understanding of all the components and configuration options available to be used in an automation and will usually require familiarity with templating.
Yes, if you design the blueprint to allow that. There are selectors for conditions and triggers.
Hello Jan,
So the right way to write a Blueprint, (well let’s call it best practice and the method suggested in the docs), is to write an automation or script that does a simplified version of that you want first, then add the blueprint magic sauce. Getting the logic working is not always easy, and becomes obfuscated in all that variable substitution stuff, making everything frustrating.
Get what you want working, then make the blueprint out of that by adding the !inputs and variables and such. Try to avoid device triggers and selectors. You can make them work, but people tend to struggle with those when dealing with them outside of the GUI editor context.
There are generally 2 reasons to make a blueprint.
- because you want to do the same thing multiple times, like my script blueprint to talk to my broadlink and program buttons to turn on and off my AV equipment. I have re-used that script blueprint about a dozen times in my config.
- You are doing something you think is cool and you want to share it with others.
If you are doing something only once, the blueprint only complicates things for you.
WhatAreWeFixing.Today’s - Sir GoodEnough’s Home Assistant GIT Config - GitHub - SirGoodenough/Home-Assistant-Config: My HA Configuration... This is what I run for production in my house. AND Blueprints repo.
Think of automation blueprints as reusable automations.