Manual MQTT device not on entities page unless unique_id specified

Configuration
1

Getting started with MQTT lights and after setting up one, I checked Configuration > Entities and was confused it wasn’t there. I later added a unique_id property to the yaml config and now it appears in Entities.

I guess HA just makes do without a unique id but why not make that property required and then the entity_id could be based on that instead of Name (which is usually the friendly name, no?) not to mention that without a unique_id, name and entity cannot be configured through the UI. Might also help if some of this was mentioned in the docs.

2

Thanks for putting me on track for the reason it didn’t showed up.

And discovered you could also add unique id in the payload, like this:

topic: homeassistant/sensor/test_mqtt/config

payload:
{
    "name": "test_mqtt", 
    "unique_id": "sensor.test_mqtt",
    "device_class": "timestamp", 
    "state_topic": "homeassistant/sensor/test_mqtt/state"
}

and totaly agree, it should be somewhere in the docs.