Smart Home Automations With Home Assistant

The home assistant dashboard lets you see the status of your devices and to manually control them.

But how do you automatically control devices? The answer is via automations.

An automation consists of a trigger+condition(optional) + action as you will see in the wizard.

For example we can create an automation to send a message (action) when motion is detected (trigger) if it is between 9pm and 6am(condition)

There are two ways of configuring automations in home assistant.

Manual edit of configuration.yaml file
Using the Automation Wizard

Manual Edit

This is by far the hardest way of configuring automations and involves editing a file which is usually the automations.yaml file.

The configuration.yaml file is the general configuration file whereas the automations.yaml file is specific to automations.

You need to add a line in the configuration.yaml file to include the automations.yaml file if it is not there. The line looks like this:

automation: !include automations.yaml

Using the Wizard

This is by far the easiest way of configuring automations . You can find the wizard in Settings>Automations and Scenes.

automation-wizard

When you click it you will see the current automations.You can click on the automation and edit it or click on the three dots to the right to manage it as shown below:

automations

There is a big blue button at the bottom of the screen to create a new automation using the wizard.

The automations wizard stores the automation in the automations.yaml file ,and you can see the yaml code for each step of the automation in the editor.

edit-automation