I am new to Home Assistant but not so new to IoT devices. I hate having a ton of apps to control everything so I searched around to find a one stop shop tool. I looked a few but found they are very hard to setup and very code based. Home Assistant seems to be the best at ease of setup by using the guides. I question I am looking for since I am a bit confused on some parts. I see most of the entries are done on the configuration.yaml file but I see all these .py files out there and was not sure what to do with them. I have had some success on setting up some components but many errors on other ones. I have looked at a lot of others setups on GitHub and even here but could not figure out what was what in them. I can see some flow to it but then some take a very hard right or left on configuration. I have seen others divide things into directories and I tried to mimic it but no joy there such as lights, sensors, and switches. The group setup instructions really does not make much sense. I set them up in groups and then HA says it cannot load groups so not sure what I am doing there. Is there a dummies guide to doing each of the steps to get devices added and working correctly on HA? I am using an HA docker on UnRAID platform with supporting components like MQTT, NodeRed, and HADashboard on same UnRAID. I would love to have HASS.IO but can’t not seem to find anyone that has got it working right on UnRAID unless using the VMs. Do not want to use VM’s if possible. Any help would be great!!!
yes, all configuration is done in the YAML files. The configuration.yaml file is the main file, however, for many it gets large and unruly rather quickly. Some files are split by default (automations.yaml is an example). There are many ways to break up the config to make it easier to manage which are outlined in the link below.
In general you shouldn’t mess with .py files unless you are a developer making a component or using a custom component.
It sounds like you are trying to do to much at once. Focus on one integration. Get it up and running, set up the automations you need based on that integration and display it on the front end as you like. Then do the same for the next item.
There is a ton of information in the docs, however, it can be a bit overwhelming for a newbie. Your best bet is to try and search the docs and if you get stuck ask a question on the forum or in the chat. Lots of people around to help.
Yes the unruly part is the reason I wanted to break it up. I read through the splitting it up but for some reason when I do everything stops working. I am pointing the configuration.yaml to section .yaml with the !include statements. Still running into issues. Ok understand on the .py files I do have a few custom component so those will be tricky then. You maybe right I may just want to start with a blank slate and work out from there. I have been through the documentation a few times but there seems that sections are vary vague in answers. I notice the discovery works for some items but not all items. Thanks for the help.