Configuring Home Assistant

These pages explain how to set up your Home Assistant: the details of your home, the people who use it, how your entities are named and shown, and how you reach your Home Assistant from outside your home. You find most of these settings in the UI, under Settings. Some integrations and settings also use YAML, which is optional for most setups.

Your home and the people in it

• Home information: Your home’s name, location, time zone, and units of measurement.
• People and user configuration: Your own profile, and the people who use your Home Assistant.

Entities and helpers

• Customizing entities: Rename or hide entities, and change their icons or other properties.
• Helpers: Entities that you create yourself, such as a toggle, a timer, or a sensor that combines other sensors.

Remote access and security

• Remote access to Home Assistant: Ways to reach your Home Assistant from outside your home network.
• Securing your Home Assistant: Settings and practices that keep your Home Assistant secure.

YAML configuration

Some integrations and settings are set up in the configuration.yaml file instead of the UI. You only need these pages if you edit this file.

• The configuration.yaml file: When you need it, where to find it, and how to edit it safely.
• YAML syntax: The rules you need to know to edit YAML by hand.
• Storing secrets in YAML: Keep passwords and API keys in a separate secrets.yaml file.
• Splitting up the configuration: Split configuration.yaml into smaller files.
• Packages: Bundle related YAML configuration from several integrations into one file.
• Entity component platform options: Shared entity options, such as the polling interval.

How Home Assistant works

• Entities and domains: How devices, sensors, and services appear as entities, grouped by domain.
• State and state object: What the state of an entity contains.
• Events: How parts of Home Assistant tell each other that something has happened.
• Long-term statistics: How Home Assistant keeps trends for sensors over months and years.

Troubleshooting

• Troubleshooting configuration: Find and fix problems in your configuration, turn on debug logging, and download diagnostics.