Category: YAML Library
A growing collection of tested Home Assistant YAML snippets organized by use case. Each entry includes the code, plain-language explanation of what it does, and notes on the placeholders you need to swap for your own entity IDs.
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What Your UniFi Cameras Can Actually Do in Home Assistant
Most people buy security cameras to record. I use mine to trigger automations. In this post I’ll walk through how I’ve wired UniFi Protect into Home Assistant to handle package deliveries, doorbell alerts with live snapshots, backyard presence detection, and keeping tabs on Clarke — all locally, all without a subscription.
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The Essential Home Assistant Add-Ons Every User Should Install
There are two stores inside Home Assistant and most beginners only find one of them. This is the list of 10 add-ons actively running in my setup right now: Z-Wave, Music Assistant, the full local voice stack, ESPHome, and the MCP Server that lets AI work directly inside your smart home.
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Don’t Forget Your Z-Wave Network
Your Home Assistant backup doesn’t include your Z-Wave network. That’s a separate process entirely — and skipping it could mean resetting and re-pairing every device in your home. Brad Andrews walks through the exact Z-Wave backup process he uses across three controller migrations, none of which cost him a single device.
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The Blueprint: Locking Down Home Assistant With mTLS — So Hackers Can’t Even Find the Door
A login page is not enough protection. Anyone who can reach yours can probe it, fingerprint it, and hammer it. mTLS via Cloudflare Zero Trust fixes that, bad actors get a Cloudflare access denied screen before they ever touch your network. Here is exactly how to set it up, including the iOS profile install and…
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Be Smart About Your Smart Home: Setting Up Home Assistant Backups (The Right Way)
Setting up Home Assistant backups takes less than 15 minutes and could save you days of work. Brad Andrews walks through the exact setup he runs — daily automatic backups to a Synology NFS share and Nabu Casa cloud — plus how to restore when something goes wrong.
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The Blueprint: How to Set Up a Cloudflare Tunnel for Home Assistant (Free, Secure Remote Access Without Port Forwarding)
Port forwarding your Home Assistant to the internet is a security risk most guides gloss over. Here’s how I replaced Nabu Casa remote access with a Cloudflare Tunnel for free, no open ports, and a foundation for locking things down even further with mTLS. Updated for Cloudflare’s current Zero Trust dashboard, which has changed significantly…
