Getting Started with Home Assistant

This chapter will introduce you to the Home Assistant software. You will learn how it was created and maintained. You will also learn about the different Home Assistant resources available at present and ways you can access and contribute to the community of developers and makers.

Besides this, this chapter will also cover a brief introduction to YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML) so you will be familiar with how Home Assistant handles configurations and customizations using an interpreted language. We will see how to create a home automation server by guiding you to install Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi. Next, we will do some menu navigation to give you an overview of the resources available in Home Assistant. I will also guide you through the basic configurations, applications, and integrations required to set up the Home Assistant server to interact with sensors and actuators.

We will cover the following main topics in this chapter...