Been looking into getting a trigger for a yearly automation, and everything I read talks about having to set a time trigger and then do condition filtering for month and date.
Why?
If I can set a onetime date, say 2025-01-23, why can’t the year be replaced by a wildcard instead of having to mess around with extra steps?
Probably because those were old topics written before the local calendar trigger was available. Use that. Much easier.
The alternative to creating a repeating event in a local calendar is to use a template trigger. This is an example that will trigger at 6am every Christmas:
{{ now() >= today_at('06:00:00').replace(month=12,day=25) }}
If one of those options is adequate you can mark the WTH as solved. If you are looking for something else, I would suggest adding some detail describing the solution you’d like to see.
If it’s yearly then you shouldn’t specify the year, just month and date.
That is the same as a wildcard.
Example:
{{ "-01-23" in now().date() | string }}
Looking up the yaml is what I’m trying to avoid, if it was something complicated, sure, but just to have a automation trigger once a year, or even once a month at a specific time should just be tap, tap, tap from the visual editor.
If Calendar supported picking a specific event without having to write yaml for the condition, if time supported wildcards, or time pattern supported days and months it wouldn’t be a thing.
You could make a yearless date template sensor Helper. If you want to trigger on just the date, use it as the trigger… if you want a specific time, use a Time trigger and add the sensor as a condition.
That is 100% do-able in the UI and the sensor could be used for any date… no YAML and one template that you tune to your preferred format:
{{now().strftime('%m/%d') }}
To me, that seems easier than tap-tap-tapping through a date selector.