Onboarding Home Assistant

After Home Assistant has been installed on your device, there are 5 steps to complete setting up Home Assistant.

1. Enter the following URL into the browser’s address bar: http://homeassistant.local:8123/.

   • Result: You now see the Preparing Home Assistant page. Depending on your hardware and internet connection, preparation may take a while.
     • Home Assistant downloads the latest version of Home Assistant CoreHome Assistant Core is the heart of Home Assistant itself. It is a Python program that powers every installation type, but can be installed standalone. [Learn more] (about 700 MB).
   • If you ran into issues with this step, refer to the installation troubleshooting.
   • Once preparation is finished, the welcome screen is shown.

   

2. You can either create a new installation or recover an existing installation from a backup:

   • Option 1: new installation: If this is your initial installation, we will now create the owner’s account of Home Assistant.
     • This account is an administrator account. It will always be able to change everything.
     • Select Create my smart home.
     • Enter a name, username, and password.
       • Make sure the username is lowercase and contains no whitespace.
     • Store the name, username, and password somewhere safe. There is no way to recover the owner credentials.
     • Select Create account.

   

   • Option 2: restore from backup: If you want to restore a backup of a previous installation, select Restore from backup.
     • Ignore the rest of this procedure and continue with the procedure on restoring from backup.

3. Enter the location of your home.

   • The location is used to configure the time zone, unit system, and currency.
   • It is also used for automations such as showing the weather, opening the shades at sunrise, or starting the vacuum when you leave the home.
   • You can always change this information later in the settings.
   • After finding your location, select Next.

   

4. Select which information you are willing to share.

   • Sharing is disabled by default. However, we would like to encourage you to share some of this data.
   • This information helps us find out which platforms we need to support and where to focus our efforts.
   • The data is anonymized and aggregated. To see the charts we generate out of this data, take a look at our analytics page.
   • To confirm, select Next.

5. Check out the devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. Home Assistant has discovered on your network.

   • Don’t be alarmed if you see fewer items than shown below; you can always manually add devices later.
   • Select Finish.

6. You’ve now got Home Assistant up and running.

   • You now see the default dashboard.
   • If some of your devices were discovered and set up automatically, this shows those devices.