So.. you’ve just installed Home Assistant and now you need to get everything setup?
The Home Assistant initial setup is actually surprisingly straightforward and really is just the case of following the instructions presented on screen.
Where it gets a bit more complicated is adding any devices which aren’t found automatically during the initial installation.
Table of Contents
How to setup Home Assistant
We assume you’ve gone through the initial installation process for your device of choice, be that a raspberry pi, a docker image or (like me) hass.io in ESXI as a virtual machine.
Navigate to your install
Once you’ve got Home Assistant powered up and you’ve taken note of the IP address and port number, open up your favourite web browser and navigate to it.
My example below is;
https://192.168.1.11:8123Set your username and password
Your IP address may be different, but you should be greeted with the following screen;
Choose a Name, which will also self populate as your Username by default, although you can edit this.
Choose a password, preferably one that doesn’t suck, I personally like having chrome generate something random, or use a tool like this.
Name and locate your home
Next you want to give your home a name;
And set your location. If you click the DETECT button you’ll likely get an address pinpointed that is nowhere near where you live!
You can fine tune your address by clicking and dragging the pinpoint icon, or you can change this later in settings.
It’s actually useful to have your Home location set within Home Assistant as you can use this later to automate certain things.
Untick all these pointless things
Home Assistant is pretty sweet and is likely much more trustworthy than some other options, so you may decide you want to share all of this information to help the project.
I personally turn everything off (which is the default setting).
Allow Home Assistant to integrate all the devices and services it can find
Home Assistant will pick up some (probably not all) of your smart home devices automatically, some you may have even forgotten about.
Oh wait, I’ve got some smart plugs laying around plugged in somewhere?….
You can turn these all off and on later, I just let it add everything.
Complete!
That’s it, you’ve successfully setup Home Assistant!
You may have seen YouTube videos, reddit posts or other blogs discussing about how Home Assistant is complicated, but you’ve just set it up in about 1 minute!
However, there is a little bit more to it than that..
What next?
As you can see the basic Home Assistant Initial Setup really isn’t complicated, however as you can see from the above screenshot it doesn’t really do much “out of the box” and requires some additional setup to really get the most out of it.
Luckily we’ve got you covered, so let’s jump to some of the most popular things you’ll want to do next;
- Setup Home Assistant with a static IP address
- Setup Home Assistant with DuckDNS for remote access
- Setup Home Assistant with Phillips Hue
- Setup Home Assistant with HomeKit
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