Smart Home & AutomationStarter draft
A Local-First Smart Home with Home Assistant
An outline for notes on building a smart home that keeps working locally, using Home Assistant.
2 min read
- home-assistant
- automation
- local-first
- self-hosting
Starter draft. This note is an outline. Sections marked Needs input are waiting for real experience and have not been written yet.
This is a starter draft. It sketches what I want to write about a local-first smart home, and leaves every claim about my own setup to be filled in.
What local-first means to me
The idea is that the home keeps doing its job without depending on someone else's servers. How strictly to hold that line is a design choice.
The setup
An example automation
Automations in Home Assistant are written in YAML. The block below is a placeholder with made-up entity names, there to show how configuration looks in notes. It is not taken from my setup.
# Placeholder sketch. Replace with a real automation from my setup.
alias: "Example automation"
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.example
to: "on"
actions:
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.example
What I'd do differently
Open questions
- Which parts are worth the effort of running locally, and which are not?
- How do I keep it reliable enough that others in the home trust it?
- What would I automate next, and what should stay manual?