I can’t find any existing posts up to date for all the recent great work on HA discussing the best way for someone starting out to go about configuration.
I appreciate there are a lot of people who came from the days of configuration.yaml and may be hanging on accordingly. And I understand HA is moving to the UI approach to make it more accessible to the masses.
I am basically starting out with my setup. I’m comfortable with yaml and I like that I can search and see text files, rapidly copy and paste, and find and replace, etc over a database that seems to have a reasonable front-end but is still not as readily updated, as easy to source control, etc. But I can also see that you can’t do everything in yaml (anymore?) and the product is moving to the UI.
So do I suck it up and get onboard with the UI from the start, or is yaml still the way if you don’t fear it?
Well, the short answer is … you have no choice in the matter.
Integrations pretty much exclusively (there are exceptions, because there’s always exceptions) YAML or UI. You just have to follow the integration’s docs telling you how that integration is configured.
I don’t do anything in the UI unless I have to or it’s a small thing that is easier to do there.
All of the regular stuff and especially the advanced stuff I do in yaml (automations, scripts, packages, lovelace dashboards, etc).
supposedly that kind of stuff isn’t going away in yaml.
My vote is always use yaml for what you need to it to do and use the UI when required.
you won’t regret it.
even if one day yaml is completely eliminated (doubtful) you will still be way more knowledgeable in HA than someone who has only ever used the UI for everything.
On the subject of composing automations, it’s the opposite; you can’t use the Automation Editor in UI mode to take advantage of everything that’s possible with Home Assistant’s scripting language. To employ scripting’s more advanced aspects (and several conveniences) the automation must be composed as YAML.
In case anyone was wondering, whatever you compose with the Automation Editor in UI mode is ultimately stored as YAML.