Home Assistant Breaking Change: All Light Groups

Your Groups are all Wrong!

I have been running Home Assistant from the very beginning and the very first light group I used was the auto generated group.all_lights. This was an auto-generated light group that automatically contained all my lights discovered by Home Assistant.  So when I left my house, the smart home would issue a nice and clean command using the group to turn off all my lights.  Brilliant!

image

This was the old way of doing it apparently.   While it still works just fine, there has been some discussion about deprecating the autogenerated groups.  I’ve been tracking this issue and decided to get in front of it. [Issue #560]

Being an awesome Open Source project like Home Assistant, the devs and founder have most of the conversations and direction of the software laid out nicely in GitHub project boards so you can check out the direction that the software is going and weigh in on what the devs might do next.  This discussion of dropping the autogenerating groups would definitely become a breaking change in Home Assistant (and specifically my setup) that I decided to get ahead of it so when the change goes through, I won’t have to change anything.

The change is super easy and basically just replaces the group.all_* groups with a simple all entity.  Nice and clean, easy to understand and implement.

image

While implementing the changes across my project, I also decided to update my Home Assistant to the latest version.

Happy Automating!

TAGS