Light group immediately unavailable

Configuration
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1

Hi,

In a certain room there are 3 smart bulbs hanging from the ceiling, which I would like to make a group for so I won’t have to control them individually. I have read the docs and some forum posts which basically tell me to create one in /config/configuration.yaml like this:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
light:
  - platform: group
    name: "Kitchen Lights"
    entities:
      - light.kitchen_ceiling_lights
      - light.kitchen_under_cabinet_lights
      - light.kitchen_spot_lights
      - light.pendant_lights

So I take this template and fill it in for myself:

light:
  - platform: group
    name: Alle lichten
    entities:
      - light.emiel_spot1
      - light.emiel_spot2
      - light.emiel_spot3

Note: all lightbulbs are identical and all works as intended, so no ‘unavailable’ bulbs.

Now when I add this and reload configurations, a new enitty pops up which looks like this:

Screenshot from 2022-04-15 17-42-26
Screenshot from 2022-04-15 17-42-261314×232 11.5 KB

When you hover over the exclamantion mark, it just says ‘unavailable’. It is also complaining that it’s missing a unique ID, though I see no one explicitly setting up a unique ID for a group.

Where am I going wrong? Am I supposed to give it a manual unique_id?
Any help would my very appreciated!

Cheers,
Emiel

2

Try restarting home assistant.

If you want to assign the light to an area. Personally I don’t find areas much use.

3

Ok so I looked at what the newest update for Home Assistant had changed, and as it turns out you can now define groups as an integration. So I installed all HASS related updates and when those finished I restarted the whole server just in case. I then used that helper integration to define a new group and guess what: it works now. My question now though: where are those groups stored? I would very much like to see where I went wrong.

4

You didn’t do anything wrong. You just can’t reload light group platforms defined in yaml. You need to restart home assistant (not the whole host machine).

The UI defined light groups are saved in the non user editable storage registry.

5

Ok so you are saying I didn’t do anything wrong, but why does the (yaml) group then report as ‘unavailable’ even after restarts? Seems to me like it’s a bug then.

I won’t be stuck on this for too long, but this is definitely weird.