Adding devices to Home Assistant

Home Assistant will be able to automatically discover many devices and services available on your network if you have the discovery component enabled (the default setting).

See the components overview page to find installation instructions for your devices and services. If you can’t find support for your favorite device or service, consider adding support.

Usually every entity needs its own entry in the configuration.yaml file. There are two styles for multiple entries:

Style 1: Collect every entity under the “parent”

sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    state_topic: "home/bedroom/temperature"
    name: "MQTT Sensor 1"
  - platform: mqtt
    state_topic: "home/kitchen/temperature"
    name: "MQTT Sensor 2"
  - platform: rest
    resource: http://IP_ADDRESS/ENDPOINT

switch:
  - platform: vera

Style 2: List each device separately

You need to append numbers or strings to differentiate the entries, as in the example below. The appended number or string must be unique.

media_player livingroom:
  platform: mpd
  server: IP_ADDRESS

media_player kitchen:
  platform: plex

camera 1:
  platform: generic

camera 2:
  platform: mjpeg

Grouping devices

Once you have several devices set up, it is time to organize them into groups. Each group consists of a name and a list of entity IDs. Entity IDs can be retrieved from the web interface by using the Set State page in the Developer Tools ().

# Example configuration.yaml entry showing two styles
group:
  living_room:
    entities: light.table_lamp, switch.ac
  bedroom:
    entities:
      - light.bedroom
      - media_player.nexus_player

For more details please check the Group page.