6 ESSENTIAL Beginner's Tips After Installing Home Assistant

can you give us your top six essential beginner tips for after you've installed home assistant with one bonus intermediate tip it's oddly specific but sure hey guys and welcome back to another tech tutorial tuesday the series where you guys ask questions and i do my best to answer them as quickly and efficiently as possible and yes i did make that question off at the start because i didn't have a specific question um to answer for you guys this week but i did still have some topics i wanted to cover so i thought i'd give you my top six essential tips for things to do after you've done the initial home assistant installation and these are things i do on every single home assistant installation that i do whether it's for myself or for somebody else and so let's just waste no more time just jump straight into the tips and very quickly if you like this video make sure to drop a like and hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and if you want your question answered in the next tech tutorial tuesday then make sure to leave it in the comments box down below and you never know i might just answer it tip number one is a very simple one and that is to turn on advanced mode for your user profile often when you follow along with other youtube tutorials or how-to guides you'll often find that you're missing options or your screen doesn't quite look the same as what you're seeing in the video and that's because you haven't turned on advanced mode turning on advanced mode allows you to get gain access to additional functionality or settings that you wouldn't normally see or you don't see without it turned on these can range from things like different options in the restart menu for home assistant or even include things as not seeing specific add-ons in the add-ons menu and it's really easy to turn on if you head down to your user profile in the bottom left-hand corner click on there and then you'll notice in the center an option to turn on advanced mode tick that box and then all of a sudden you'll have access to all the functionality that you were otherwise missing so that is tip number one turn on advanced mode tip number two is very important and that is to enable ssh ssh is very essential because as a beginner it's highly likely that you will lock yourself out of your home assistant and so having ssh is very important because you can just remote in and fix your issue i've seen tons of people have issues that they've had to completely rebuild their home assistant instance all because they didn't have ssh enabled and it's very easy to do so to enable ssh you're going to want to head into the supervisor store and then into add-ons now there are two ssh add-ons in the supervisor store one is called terminal and ssh and the other is called ssh and web terminal you're gonna want to make sure it's the ssh and web terminal one i just found that one to work better personally once you've found it hit install and then head over into the configuration tab and then in the box you're gonna want to enter a password make sure to choose something strong here because the passwords are checked against the have i been pwned database to test their strength and the add-on won't start if the password is bad unless you override it head back into the info tab and then check the options you want and hit start and that's pretty much all you need to do give it a few seconds to start up and then you'll notice the web terminal in the sidebar click on that and you'll be brought straight into the home assistant terminal you can check ssh is running by downloading a program like putty and then entering the ip address of your home assistant server and it should connect right up tip number three is an obvious one but it's often the most overlooked and that is to have a good backup as a beginner again you're gonna make lots of mistakes and that's okay that's how you learn and we've all been there before we've all made mistakes and that's what keeps us progressing and keeps us learning but having a good backup is important because it allows you to recover to a point in time where everything was working correctly remember this could be something that is going to be controlling your entire house potentially so having a good backup strategy is important so that you can quickly recover if things go wrong i've actually done an entire video dedicated to automating your backups which you can check out up here that uses google drive and it will completely and seamlessly automate your entire backup strategy but i would also suggest creating your own backups or taking your own snapshots every time you do something major um just to save you in case of emergency so you what you're going to want to do is head over into supervisor and then click on the snapshots tab and then take a snapshot you can also download this snapshot to your machine so that you have it just in case things go south so that is tip number three backups tip number four is to have a good file editor there are quite a few to choose from in home assistant supervisor store but my personal favorite is the visual studio code i know a lot of you guys are asking which file editor i use so the one i use is visual studio code and you can get that from the supervisor store it handles a lot of the syntax for you so it will actually make suggestions on syntax or auto complete a lot of the fields for you so it's very handy um but it doesn't run on every device it doesn't run on the raspberry pi that is not a 64-bit os so you need a 64-bit os on the raspberry pi to run it and also the minimum recommended ram is four gigabytes if you're running a raspberry pi 32-bit os or less than four gigabytes so the two gigabyte variant um you can use the file editor which is also available in the supervisor store and that will install and that will also give you a file editor on the sidebar straight into your configuration file and that works very well also that's a very good second alternative if you're running home assistant core then you probably would need to set up some sort of samba share into your configuration and then use something like notepad plus plus or you could use visual studio code on your desktop and to edit those files over the samba share so that is tip number four use a file editor tip number five is one that might not be as obvious and that is to install the systems monitoring integration for your home assistant server and i think this is particularly important if you're running lower-end hardware such as a raspberry pi or an intel nok and the systems monitoring integration allows you to keep an eye on things like your cpu usage your memory usage your disk usage and your cpu temperature as well as your network monitoring and i think this is important for lower land hardware because as you grow your home assistant integration you're going to add more and more integrations and more and more add-ons and that's going to naturally cause the cpu and the memory usage to rise as well as your disk usage and therefore it's also going to cause your cpu temperature to rise as your cpu is working harder and so having or keep being able to keep an eye on these values is going to build to help you diagnose any potential issues as you start to grow your home assistant server so for example you may add an integration that suddenly causes the cpu usage to rise and your home assistant server just dies and it becomes a lot more sluggish and so being able to go back to a point in time and identify where that spike started to happen is going to help you to potentially diagnose that issue and also keeping an eye on your cpu temperatures and also your disk usage is very important because home assistant can really start to struggle and not operate properly if the disk runs out of space so that is tip number five keep an eye on your system's monitoring tip number six is to install hacks and hacks stands for home assistant community store and i've covered hacks a ton in the previous videos over the last couple of months and i think it is pretty much essential for anyone getting into home assistant at this point i think you should install hacks and hacks essentially opens up hundreds of community-made custom integrations and front-end cards or themes that literally allow you to one-click and install any of the hundreds of custom integrations straight into your home assistant it takes care of the whole process of installing custom integrations if you want to know how to install hacks you can find it in a video up here i've done a whole video on it that covers how to install it so that is tip number six install hacks okay so your bonus tip number seven is to change the default database type from sqlite to mariadb and this is definitely more of an intermediate tip but in my experience mariadb not only offers much greater speed when using home assistant but also reliability over the years i've used both sqlite and mariadb and i've certainly found to be mariadb a lot more reliable and you'll notice much greater speed when you're restarting your home assistant but also when you're loading things like the log book or the history graphs they seem to be a lot more responsive especially as your home assistant grows to be much larger than um when you first start out so the only time i wouldn't use this is if you have a raspberry pi with an sd card definitely stick to the default database type this will only wear out your sd card much faster so don't change to mariadb if you're using a raspberry pi with an sd card but for everyone else i think you could be and potentially leaving performance on the table by not changing to mariadb so that is your bonus tip number seven change the default database type so that's my top six essential tips for things to do after you've installed home assistant and we even threw in a bonus intermediate one as well i'm curious do you guys have any other must-haves that i didn't mention here make sure to drop them in the comments box down below share them with others and we can all benefit from them if you like this video make sure to drop a like and hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and if you want to consider supporting the channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon the links are in the description and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current supporters as always thank you so much for watching this video and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 46,869

Keywords: home assistant, home automation, smart home, home assistant tips and tricks, home assistant beginner, home assistant beginner's guide, home assistant installation, home assistant ssh, home assistant add ons, home assistant hacs, home assistant hacs install, home assistant basics, home assistant backup, home assistant backups, home assistant snapshots, home assistant database, home assistant mariadb, home assistant advanced mode, home assistant setup, home assistant guide

Id: Oxg6rzZo-Pg

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021