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Recipes

Scope: five small builds that assemble only what earlier chapters verified or clearly labelled — each with its shape, not just its steps, so you can adapt rather than copy.

1. The lab, rebuilt on your machine

The whole specimen, for readers who want the verified thing in their hands:

  1. Chapter 3's venv and install: pip install homeassistant, note the version hass --version reports.
  2. A configuration directory holding the three files from examples/ (configuration.yaml, automations.yaml, scripts.yaml).
  3. ./ha-venv/bin/hass --script check_config -c <dir> — expect the near-silence of t01 and exit code 0.
  4. Start it; if the demo fails the way t02 shows, you now know the fix's shape: read the missing module's name, install the package that provides it, restart. (The lab needed mutagen, ha-ffmpeg, pymicro-vad, pyspeex-noise.)
  5. Onboard, then look at Developer tools → States: the porch light, the helpers, the sun, and the demo's crowd — the same census as t04.

You now own every behaviour chapters 5–7 describe.

2. A light that follows the seasons

The specimen automation, generalised: any entity in the light domain, the sun trigger with a negative offset for "before dark" or a positive one for "after," and a condition that reflects your household's actual gate — a mode helper like evening_mode, a weekday condition, a presence state. The shape matters more than the specimen: sun triggers age well because they track the year; clock triggers quietly become wrong twice a year and nobody notices until the porch is dark at dinner in December.

3. The washer that announces itself

The household favourite, in outline: a smart plug with power monitoring on the washing machine. A template or threshold sensor reads "drawing real power" as washing; an automation watches for the fall from washing to idle sustained for a few minutes, and fires a notification. No part of this is exotic — it is a state change (chapter 1), a condition with a duration, and a notify action — but it converts a device the hub can see into information the household feels. The plug and its readings are real-world steps this guide labels documented-only; the automation's shape is chapter 5's, verbatim.

4. Away mode, honestly

One input_boolean named away_mode, set by a dashboard button (or a phone's location, via the companion apps — documented-only here). Automations read it as a condition: the dusk light still comes on (a house that goes visibly dark for a week is advertising), the thermostat's setpoint relaxes, and any door event after midnight notifies. The lesson is architectural: modes as helpers, rules as readers. Ten automations consulting one helper beat ten automations each reinventing "are we away?"

5. The pre-update drill

From chapter 7, as a checklist to tape to the hub:

  1. Read the new release's backward-incompatible changes; search for your integrations by name.
  2. Make a backup; confirm the archive exists and note its date (the lab's was backups/e853edc2.tar, t05).
  3. Update by your shape's path.
  4. Read the first minutes of the log for Setup failed lines — by name, not by vibe.
  5. Walk the house's three felt automations by hand.

Five steps, fifteen minutes, and the monthly train becomes boring — which is the highest praise operations work ever earns.

Check: each recipe should read as assembly, not magic — every step names the chapter that earned it. If one doesn't, that chapter, not this one, is where the gap lives.