0Home Assistant Tweaks

I’ve made a num­ber of improve­ments to my home assist­ant instance of late and wanted to doc­u­ment what they were

Add ZigBee to sidebar menu

I have a Con­Bee Zig­Bee USB stick but to view the net­work I’ve always had to go in via con­fig­ur­a­tion -> integ­ra­tions. I wanted instead to have a dir­ect link on the main left-hand menu. An art­icle on DigiBlur had most of the info I needed. I adjus­ted the 1 line needed, restar­ted HA and got the desired menu straight away. Just add the fol­low­ing code to you configuration.yaml

Switch database to mariadb

This only switches the his­tory data­base and has no risk of break­ing your HA setup. You may well lose your his­tory though — I wanted to get rid of my 4Gig data­base so I choose to delete it before restart­ing so I could start from clean. I fol­lowed a nice guide by lkeays on the HA for­ums. I also wanted to make sure the data­base did­n’t expand out of con­trol again in future so I also tweaked what is kept in the data­base by fol­low­ing a guide by denilsonsa also on the HA for­ums. I ended up adding the fol­low­ing to configuration.yaml (note you do also need to add a couple of addons via the super­visor add-on store so do read the guides linked as you need more than just the code below.

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