New to Home Assistant - how to get things going?

Configuration
1

Hi,
I am new to Home Assistant and home automation in general. I installed Hassbian 1.1 on a Pi 3 and got it running with Mosquitto as my MQTT broker. Now I want to start adding MQTT sensor data and switches to Home Assistant but for the live of me I can’t seem to figure out how to do this? I go into the configuration file, added the MQTT details and Switch - but it does not show anywhere on the server web page… Just about all the switches and sensors will be connected using MQTT as it will mostly be DIY projects.

This is what I added to the bottom of the default configuration file that was generated, then restarted the pi…

mqtt:
  broker: SERVER IP - TAKEN OUT FOR THIS POST
  port: 1883
  client_id: home-assistant-1
  keepalive: 60
  username: TAKEN OUT FOR THIS POST
  password: TAKEN OUT FOR THIS POST
  protocol: 3.1 
  
switch:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Bedroom Switch"
    state_topic: "home/bedroom/switch1"
    command_topic: "home/bedroom/switch1/set"
    payload_on: "ON"
    payload_off: "OFF"
    optimistic: false
    qos: 0
    retain: true
2

You need to add your entity to a group to display it, to start with add it to the default_view. See this page for examples

In your case, you will need to add switch.bedroom_switch to whichever group you want to display it with.

The button with <> on the left hand side of the home-assistant web page has a list of all your entities, with their exact names.

3

@gpbenton I forgot to add that to my post, I had the light switches under groups. Turns out after a reboot Mosquitto lost my password. Re-creating the user name and password file sorted it out and my switches are now appearing and working…