A collection of posts on how to perform common tasks and deal with common problems. This Guide is intended for those new to Home Assistant, those that are struggling for answers on some subjects, and those in troubleshooting mode. All of the Home Assistant Posts are made by Community Members and most are posted in Community Guides for your convenience.
Getting Started With The Forum
- Discourse New User Guide (this forum uses the Discourse software)
- Hands-on Practical Courses to learn Discourse Commands
- How to help us help you - or How to ask a good question
- How to help us help them - or How to give a good answer
- Don’t ask to ask
- Tips on Community Searching
- Custom Search Links for Frequent Searchers.
- Formatting YAML in Forum Posts
- Adding Links to Forum Posts
- Getting help in languages other than English
- How to exchange automations and scripts using the forum
Getting Started With HA
- Introduction to Home Assistant & the Official Documentation
- 20 things I wished I knew when I started with Home Assistant
- HA Glossary
- Basic Common Home Assistant Tasks You WILL Need to Know
- Tips on searching the docs
- Integrations, add-ons and custom integrations
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- Awesome Home Assistant - curated list of resources
Installation
Beginner
Advanced
- Installing Home Assistant OS using Proxmox 8
- Installing HAOS in a VM on TrueNAS
- Installing Home Assistant on VMWare Player / Workstation 16 (or 17)
- Home Assistant Core on Android Tablet
- Alternatives to Core Automated Back-ups
Database
- How to keep your recorder database size under control
- Migrate back from MariaDB to the default SQLite
- Postgresql to SQLite migration, moving back to SQLite
- Home Assistant Data Science Portal
- Dbstats - Addon for database usage analytics
Configuration
Integrations
Frontend
- Dashboards #1: Themes
- About "This entity does not have a unique ID, therefore its settings cannot be managed from the UI"
- Markdown Cheat Sheet | Markdown Guide
- Easy date and time card, using only Markdown
- Read only sensor/helper display without templates
Automations
- Understanding automations
- Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts
- Automations #1: trigger only fires when it changes from not true to true
- Automations #2: the condition block
- Automations #3: trigger_variables
- Automations #4: Disable a Trigger on the fly
- Turning lights on and off at sunset and sunrise
- Motion activated lights automation
- Automations, from Zero to Hero
- Organising and annotating automations.
- Troubleshooting
- What does the error “extra keys not allowed @ data[‘xxxx’]…” mean?
- Evolution of an automation
YAML
YAML - Advanced
- YAML Splitting up the configuration
- YAML Splitting up the configuration - Packages
- YAML Storing Secrets
- List of Example Configurations
Templating
- What the Heck is a Template and how can I use it?
- How to read a template in yaml / the why and how of all those delimiters
- What’s with all the Curly Brackets? Template Delimiters and Whitespace Control.
- Getting time and date with templates
- Trigger based template sensor to store global variables
- Trigger based template sensor to retrieve last change of an entity
- YAML Anchors to re-use code and shorten your template
- Sample templates from basic to exotic from one of the HA Devs…
- Useful Conditions Are all entities inside a domain equal to a state?
- Apples, Oranges and Bananas
- Replacement for UK Met Office integration
Notifications
Hardware
- Adding new devices and replacing devices
- Blakadder Device Compatibility Repository
- Smart Home Index
- ZHA device handlers
- Zigbee2MQTT Supported Devices
- Dashboard Hardware and Control
Energy Monitoring
- Basic energy monitoring
- How to use Utility Meter Tariffs to conditionally measure things
- Why an availability template is important for energy template sensors
- How to split a sensor into positive and negative sensors
- [GUIDE] Monitoring energy by device category and running averages
- Frequently Asked Questions for the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard
Voice Assistants
- Overview - Voice in Home Assistant
- How to launch an Alexa skill from Home Assistant
- Custom sentences and intents
- Talking about the Weather
- Friday’s Party: Creating a Private, Agentic AI using Voice Assistant tools
- Custom wake words
- Redirect Voice PE Replies to Sonos
Technologies
ESPHome
Tasmota
Zigbee
- Is Zigbee right for you?
- Zigbee buyer's guide
- Migrating from a Philips Hue Bridge to the ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) integration
- Zigbee #1: where can I find a list of supported devices?
- Zigbee network optimization: a how-to guide for avoiding radio frequency interference + adding Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable Zigbee network mesh with best possible range and coverage by fully utilizing Zigbee mesh networking
- Zigbee Guide Custom Device Handler Quirks
- Mains Powered Devices That Aren’t Routers
- A Random Collection of Zigbee Trivia
- A to Zig - a Zigbee glossary
- Database of Zigbee devices supported by ZHA, Z2M and others
- Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) supported devices
- Solution (Workaround) for ZHA devices stuck in “Interview Complete. Configuring”
- ZHA OTA Library
Z-Wave
SSH
AI
- Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
- Friday’s Party: Creating a Private, Agentic AI using Voice Assistant tools
- Problem? Getting the best solution from AI
- AI agents for the smart home
- ChatGPT for YAML Generation
- Providing Tools & Context GPT-5
Bluetooth
- About Bluetooth…
- List of compatible Bluetooth adapters
- Getting the IRK for your phone
- Flash a Bluetooth proxy
- Enhancing device tracking with the Bayesian integration
Troubleshooting
- General Troubleshooting
- Troubleshooting your configuration
- Automations
- How To Share a Debug Trace
- Companion app
- How to Troubleshoot your Rasberrry PI Crashing
- How to Get to Your Log After Restart / Restore
- Target selector & entity selector errors
- Yaml: How to read configuration errors
- Tracking Down Instability Issues Caused by Integratons
- How to set DNS after first install
For More Experienced Users
- How to Read Configuration Errors
- Template Select Entities
- Blueprints - Get Your !input Value Into a Template
- How to set a Custom Scan Interval
- How to Add Custom Buttons to the Side Toolbar
- Read-only Sensor Helper Display Without Templates
- How to use Context
- Creating Unique names in an Automation or Script
- Create a Custom Card - Home Assistant Tutorials
- Collecting and Sharing Media Files
Contributing to the Project
Contributors
New posts in this series (or improvements to existing ones - each post is a wiki) are welcome.
For this series we are limiting topics to items directly related to Home Assistant Core & Frontend, and not individual Custom Integrations, Custom Themes, Dashboard Items, Add-ons or Blueprints. Consider starting other lists for those.
Join the cookbook discussion if you have any questions or want to contribute in other ways.
- Make a post in Community Guides and tag it with
cookbook. - Include a link to this index
- Add a link from this index
Be aware that posts can be edited by anyone.