I might have gleaned enough from my first iteration to try a manual install. Sadly my install ate another SD card this morning. I’ve just dug out an ancient laptop. Looking for a solid software build, but I’ll look through the forums before posting a request.
You can turn off MQTT discovery on the device itself. The device itself determines what HA sees so if you change an option on the device it will be reflected in HA. If a device doesn’t have discovery on, you can manually add it to config yaml file. The MQTT integration instead of showing the device(s) then will say it’s using config yaml.
Personally I find MQTT discovery works pretty well.
Seems to be off by default in Tasmota. Took me ages to figure out how to SetOption19.
It has done for me. the problem is that using discovery, the device configuration is not in the configuration.yaml file.
Normal discovery and MQTT discovery are different things and your devices don’t HAVE TO be in config yaml.
1 Like
Why is that a problem?
If it’s not in the configuration.yaml file, I cannot modify the device.
Sure you can.
You can add a customize file, or you can use the Lovelace UI to edit directly.
Can I use the Lovelace UI on HA? (I’m not on HassIO any more.)
Thanks for coaching me, by the way. I think I’m making progress!
Haha! Yes I can! I never even thought of looking for it - I assumed for some odd reason that it was part of HassIO!! It’s right there in the corner like it always was!!
Literally the difference between hassio and a self install of home assistant is the hassio menu/page and add-ons.
I see the option to move the menus around in the Overview page is present in HAss. …I’d just learned how to do it manually, too!
Just so you know you’re not alone, I too am a new user and have found the HA documentation pretty confusing, and I have the advantage of already speaking YAML like it was a second language 
The challenge is that so many aspects have at least two ways of doing things, and if you happen to find the wrong bit of documentation first, life gets hard. (I think there are at least three different standard ways of setting up MQTT, and like you I followed the complex instructions last weekend before discovering I needed almost nothing for the Hassio Add-on).
So many other examples… I use Dark Sky for weather, for example, and I installed the Dark Sky sensor. Then I discovered Lovelace, which has a nice weather card, but for that you need the Dark Sky weather component instead of the sensor. Then I started playing with HADashboard which also has a weather widget, but it wants the values from the sensor…
I’ve had similar issues in the Zigbee world, ping-ponging between deConz, ZHA, zigbee2mqtt…
It’s a real problem keeping documentation up to date on a project that’s moving so fast, and I think it’s important to teach new users that the fact that some of it looks very good and is on the official site doesn’t mean, as we’ve both discovered, that it’s necessarily the best way to do things!
2 Likes
Hey David, your info above helped me a lot tonight switching from the old mosquito mqtt config method to the new integration, but one thing was a bit unclear. I deleted the old configuration.yaml entry for the mqtt broker, but with discovery now active in the integration config should I delete the old yaml entries for my devices (lights, switches, binary sensors etc) ?
I gather that they will be discovered and setup in the integration now (I have not fiddled with HA for six months so I’m a bit out of the loop) ?
1 Like
Try commenting them out and making sure they still work. Also make sure discovery is enabled on the device.
how can i expose my internal mqtt broker to internet using remote nabucasa? i want to connect remote clients …sorry for my bad english
If I need to change my homeassistant password, must I change all my MQTT devices passwords too ?
Only if you use that user as the mqtt user
Yes, I use that user as the mqtt user. I don’t know why can’t use !secret mqtt_user and !secret mqtt_pass.
Why would you expect to use HA creds via secrets in a completely different application?