I hope this is not a redundant topic or one that has been covered, but if it is, can someone point me to it please?
I have read up on the documentation and a lot of community threads that cover how to setup media, dir internal and external, etc. I am looking for a consolidated view on best practices. This whole thing started when going down the rabbit hole for sending a picture to my android companion app from Node-Red (which I could not because I do not have duckDNS or internet access although I use HA Cloud through Nabu casa, but that’s a separate topic).
Today, this is my structure:
/
-->mnt
-->share
-->tmp
-->media
-->homeassistant
-->www
-->community
-->images
-->alpd
-->etc.
mnt folder I have not figured it out yet, I see it references in some docs under media_dirs:
share folder is where I dump any file I want to be accessible by samba and shared on my home PC to download
media folder is where my media sits (audio, video, etc) and is accessible through the left menu.
www is pretty much my working directory.
community folder is created where my HACS add-ons are, done by default.
images is where I put all the images I use in my dashboards
alpd is my license plate directory where I save the images and the detections
…and so on.
My configuration looks like this based on reading some documentation and some of the community threads. Not saying it is accurate as I do not fully understand yet the allowlist_ concept. Allow to who by who basically. And external to what. Again, thinking about later making sure my androind through dns has access.
homeassistant:
customize: !include customize.yaml
packages: !include_dir_named integrations # package setup/config split
allowlist_external_dirs:
- "/tmp"
- "/share"
- /config/www/alpd
#allowlist_external_urls:
#- https://
media_dirs:
media: "/media"
local: /config/www/
media_source:
# Text to speech
tts:
- platform: google_translate
So today, everything works. I can see the media folder with some media files showing up in the menu on the left.
I can access the share folder under samba
I can see my dashboard images through HA cloud and the companion app
The question is, what is the best recommended folder structure for media in HA?
Where should I have my media files like music and videos?
Where should I have the dashboard images I use?
Where should I have the images I want to ultimately have visible through android notifications?
And how does it all relate to the confiduration.yaml declarations?
Some people have a media folder under /config/ (i.e. /homeassistant), which prompted me to revisit my structure.
I am going to be making changes, and I wanted to do it “right” from the start now and therefore my publishing this thread.