Why hasn’t HA made an easier way to delete entities besides editing a JSON file? I’m new to HA and I know I will screw something up. Yes, I would make a backup file but then be returned to return to square one. People have been complaining for years about being unable to delete an entity. What am I missing here?
You typically don’t delete entities in HA. You disable them, which makes them not show up anywhere in the system. Delete in regards to the entity list means HA will completely forget about it… which means auto discovered integrations will re-create them the next time you restart. That’s why you want to disable instead of delete. That’s also why delete is typically unavailable, the system knows it will be recreated.
1 Like
You can enable/disable and hide entities in:
Integrations > entities
You can also delete removed template entities.
Thanks for the quick reply, Petro. When I disable an entity, I get an error message that I can’t get off the dashboard. (I hope the .png file is uploaded)
If you are using a self built ui, just remove the entity from your dashboard. You removed it from the system but you didn’t remove it from your dashboard.
Edit the dashboard (upper right corner of the page)
IMHO: Sometimes, if an entity has been removed for good, I want to delete it. Or if I made some major mistakes (PEBKAS) to start “from scratch”. So I agree to emphasize “typically”. Typically you don’t delete, but there may be good reasons you want to? I’m amateur, so just IMHaO (in my humble amateurish opinion).
1 Like
If you delete the device, the entities will go with it.
2 Likes
@petro you solved my problem. At 69 my eyes work about as good as a mole. I never saw the new window popping up in the bottom left. Thanks for your help!
1 Like
@jbarthel I was assuming that it would work similar to the Alexa app. Couldn’t have been more wrong.
Now thank you for that.
This is the very, very first time someone told me the reason why it is so hard to delete an entity.
This is an eyeopener for me.
I have a system engineer background and keeping my systems clean and tiddy was my number one priority. So not doing the same with HA was an eyesore to me. But thanks now I understand why. !
To add a bit more to it:
Integrations provide entities. For as long as you have an integration active, you cannot delete its entities — you can only disable it. If you delete the integration, you can then also delete the orphaned entities (the delete option becomes available in that case).
One exception I know of is for entities created (discovered) via MQTT. In that case you need to set the topic not to retain before you delete the entity, or delete the topic.
This helps me understand HA better. There’s quite a steep learning curve on this software but it feeds my OCD tendencies completely.
TIL, thanks petro !
It will be nice to add this as tooltip in the UI so we understand why ‘delete’ is not the way to go