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.

    Home Assistant preparation

  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.

        Home Assistant preparation

      • Enter a name, username, and password.

        • Make sure the username is lowercase and contains no whitespace.
        • Info: The Name is the name of the person the is shown in the UI. The username is used for login.

        Set your username and password.

      • 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.

  3. Enter the location of your home.

    • The home location is used to configure the time zone, unit system, and currency.
    • It is also used to create the home zone, which designates the area of your home with a default radius of 100 m.
    • You can always change this information later in the settings.
    • This home zone can be used for automations such as showing the weather, opening the shades at sunrise, or starting the vacuum when you leave the home.
    • After finding your location, select Next.

    Define your location.

  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. Share anonymized data
  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. Discovery of devices on your network.
  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.

  Concepts & Terminology