Home Assistant is installed. The web interface is loading. The first hour is about orienting the system to the grower and orienting the grower to the system. This page walks through onboarding carefully, configures the essentials (location, time zone, units), sets up a first backup before anything of value accumulates, connects the mobile app, adds a first sensor as proof-of-concept, and flags what not to rush into. The result at the end of the hour is a Home Assistant installation that is properly configured for the grower's specific operation, protected by a working backup, accessible from the grower's phone, and reading at least one real-world data source. The grower is oriented enough to continue learning on their own time.
Before the first hour.
This page assumes that Home Assistant is installed and running. If not, start with one of the installation paths covered in this sub-section: [Installing Home Assistant OS](/home-assistant/installation/haos) for the simplest path, [Installing Home Assistant on Ubuntu with Docker](/home-assistant/installation/ha-docker) for the graybox pattern, [Installing Home Assistant Supervised](/home-assistant/installation/supervised) for the middle path.
Have ready:
A phone or tablet. For installing the Home Assistant Companion app during this hour.
One BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) temperature and humidity sensor. A SensorPush HT1, a Govee BLE sensor, or any similar device. This serves as the first-sensor example. Not strictly required, but the page's walkthrough becomes abstract without a real sensor. If the grower does not have one yet, continue through the other steps and come back for the first-sensor part.
Location information. Latitude and longitude (approximate is fine), elevation (useful for some integrations), time zone, the address of the operation (for weather integrations and sun calculations).
A destination for backups. A network share on another computer, a USB drive, or a cloud storage account. Something outside the Home Assistant host itself.
Step one: Onboarding.
The first time a grower accesses Home Assistant through a browser, the onboarding flow appears.
Create the administrative user.
Name, username, password. This account has full administrative access — it is the equivalent of the root user for the Home Assistant system. The password should be strong (the collective recommends a password manager), and the username should be something the grower will remember.
This account cannot be recovered if the password is lost. There is no "forgot password" email — the grower is the administrator. Keep the password safe.
Enter location and preferences.
Home Assistant asks for several pieces of information.
Home name. What to call this installation. "Our Farm," "The Greenhouse," "Home" — whatever the grower prefers. Used in the interface as a label; changeable later.
Address, latitude, longitude. The grower can enter an address and Home Assistant geocodes it, or enter coordinates directly. Used for sun calculations (sunrise, sunset, dawn, dusk), weather integrations, distance calculations, and some location-based automations. Accurate location matters for automations that run at sunrise or sunset; approximate location is fine for everything else.
Elevation. The elevation of the operation in meters. Less commonly used than location but affects some calculations (solar angle, pressure-based sensors).
Unit system. Metric (Celsius, meters, kilometers, liters) or US customary (Fahrenheit, feet, miles, gallons). The collective's site uses both depending on the audience. Choose whichever the grower works in daily.
Time zone. Critical for automations. An automation that fires "at sunset" or "at 6 AM" depends on the system knowing the local time correctly. Select the appropriate time zone for the operation's physical location.
Currency. For energy monitoring and cost calculations. Optional; only affects some integrations.
First day of the week. Monday or Sunday, depending on regional preference.
Share anonymized usage statistics.
Home Assistant asks whether to share anonymized usage data with the project. The collective recommends enabling this — it helps the project prioritize development and includes no personal information. Optional; decline if the grower prefers not to.
Device discovery.
Home Assistant scans the local network for devices it recognizes. Cast receivers, printers, smart lights, certain sensors, and common smart home brands may appear. Some can be added now; most will come later as the grower sets up specific integrations.
The default is to skip most discovered devices at onboarding — they can be added more deliberately later. Unless the grower sees something they specifically want now, skip this step.
Onboarding complete.
The default dashboard appears. Home Assistant is running.
Step two: Confirm basic configuration.
Before adding anything complex, verify the configuration from onboarding is correct.
Settings → System → General.
Confirm time zone, location, elevation, unit system. Adjust if needed. Save any changes.
Settings → System → Network.
Confirm the network configuration the installer set up. The IP address should be the static IP or DHCP reservation the grower configured during Ubuntu install (for Docker/Supervised) or first-boot (for HAOS). If the IP has changed from what was expected, update any router configuration to match.
Settings → System → Logs.
Take a quick look. Some warnings may be normal during first boot (discovery taking time, integrations not yet configured). Serious errors (red banners, crash reports) warrant investigation. Most first-hour installations have clean logs after onboarding completes.
Step three: Set up backups immediately.
Before accumulating anything of value in the system, set up a backup that works. This is not premature optimization; this is the difference between recovering a working installation in thirty minutes and rebuilding from scratch over a weekend.
For Home Assistant OS or Supervised (Supervisor available).
Settings → System → Backups.
Click "Create Backup." Choose a full backup (the default) or a partial backup (specific components). Name it something memorable like "Initial setup." Wait for the backup to complete (a few minutes for a small system).
Configure backup location.
The default is local storage on the Home Assistant host — useful but vulnerable to host failure. Configure a second location:
Network share. Add Samba or NFS share configuration. The backup saves both locally and to the share. Useful when another always-on machine on the network can hold backups.
Nabu Casa Cloud. If the grower has or gets a Home Assistant Cloud subscription, backups sync to Nabu Casa's infrastructure automatically.
External cloud via add-on. Community add-ons for Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV. Install the appropriate add-on, configure it with the service credentials, schedule automatic backup uploads.
Schedule automatic backups.
Under Backups, configure the schedule. Daily or weekly depending on how much change the operation produces. The first weeks of use produce substantial change; weekly backups for an established system with stable automations is often enough.
For Docker-based installations (no Supervisor).
The built-in backup interface is less comprehensive because there is no Supervisor. Backup strategy at the host level: tar archives of the graybox directory tree, scheduled through cron or systemd timers. [Backup and Recovery](/home-assistant/operations/backup) covers this approach. For now, create a manual backup immediately:
```bash cd /opt sudo tar -czf /tmp/graybox-initial-backup.tar.gz graybox/ ```
Copy the archive to another machine or cloud storage. Schedule automated backups later today or tomorrow — do not let this slide.
Test the backup.
A backup that has never been tested is not a backup. At some point in the first week, test the restore process. The test does not have to be elaborate — a second Home Assistant installation on a virtual machine, or on spare hardware, receiving the backup is enough to prove the backup works.
Step four: Install the mobile app.
The Home Assistant Companion mobile app provides notifications, remote access (with appropriate configuration), location awareness, and a convenient interface for checking the system away from a computer.
Download the app.
iOS: App Store, search for "Home Assistant" or go to [companion.home-assistant.io](https://companion.home-assistant.io) for direct links. Android: Google Play Store, same search.
Connect to the Home Assistant instance.
Open the app. The app scans the local network for Home Assistant instances; the grower's should appear automatically. If not, enter the URL directly: `http://server-ip:8123` (replace `server-ip` with the actual IP).
Log in with the administrative username and password created during onboarding.
Configure location tracking (optional).
The app can share the phone's location with Home Assistant for location-based automations (for example, notifying when someone arrives at the greenhouse). This is optional and has obvious privacy implications. Enable only if location-based automation will be useful; the setting can be changed later.
Configure notifications.
Grant notification permission so Home Assistant can send push notifications to the phone. Alerts, automations, and manual notifications from Home Assistant all route through this channel once enabled.
Test the connection.
Open the default dashboard in the app. It should look similar to the web interface. Tap through to confirm basic functionality works.
Step five: Add the first sensor.
Adding a sensor turns Home Assistant from an abstract platform into a real monitoring system. A Bluetooth temperature and humidity sensor is the standard first addition — inexpensive, widely available, useful, and the integration is simple.
This section assumes the grower has a BLE sensor available (SensorPush, Govee, or similar). If not, skip this step and return when a sensor is available. [Your First Sensor](/home-assistant/getting-started/first-sensor) covers the process in more depth.
Place the sensor.
Put it somewhere meaningful — in a greenhouse, near a seedling tray, wherever the first real measurement should come from. Physically close to the Home Assistant machine for the first pairing (BLE range is limited); it can be moved after pairing if needed.
Power the sensor on.
Most BLE sensors have a battery already installed and are ready to advertise once powered on. Check the sensor's documentation for any activation steps (holding a button, removing a battery tab, pairing with a specific app).
Discover the sensor in Home Assistant.
Settings → Devices & Services.
Home Assistant's Bluetooth integration should automatically detect the sensor if the Home Assistant host has Bluetooth available (either built-in on the host computer or through a USB adapter). If the Bluetooth integration is not already configured, Home Assistant prompts to add it. Accept and let it configure.
The sensor should appear in the discovered devices list within a minute or two. Click on it and complete the setup.
For sensors that do not auto-discover, the specific sensor family's integration can often be added manually. The [Bluetooth Low Energy integration](/home-assistant/integrations/ble) page covers the details.
Verify the sensor is reporting.
In the Settings → Devices & Services interface, click on the newly added device. The associated entities (temperature, humidity, and sometimes battery level) should show current readings.
Also visible from Developer Tools → States — a list of every entity in the system with its current state. The new sensor's entities appear with their current values.
Update automatically.
BLE sensors typically broadcast every few seconds to a few minutes, and Home Assistant updates the entities accordingly. Within a few minutes of adding the sensor, the current temperature and humidity should reflect the sensor's location.
This first-sensor addition is a genuine monitoring win. The grower can now see the temperature in the greenhouse (or wherever the sensor is placed) from anywhere on the local network.
Step six: Understand entities, devices, and areas.
Before building anything with the new sensor, a brief orientation to Home Assistant's data model.
Entities.
The fundamental unit. Each reading, each state, each control is an entity. A BLE temperature and humidity sensor becomes two entities (or three, counting battery level): `sensor.greenhousetemperature`, `sensor.greenhousehumidity`, `sensor.greenhouse_battery`. Each entity has a state (current value), attributes (additional metadata), and a history.
Devices.
A grouping. A physical device (the BLE sensor) groups the entities it produces. Devices are how the grower thinks about hardware; entities are how Home Assistant thinks about information.
Areas.
A locational grouping. The grower defines areas — "Greenhouse Zone 1," "Propagation," "Packhouse" — and assigns devices (and therefore entities) to them. Dashboards, automations, and scripts can reference areas rather than specific entities, which makes the system more maintainable when devices are added, removed, or moved.
Naming discipline.
Names accumulate. An entity named `sensor.sensor1` is confusing a week later; an entity named `sensor.greenhousezone1temperature` remains clear. The [Organizing Home Assistant for a Farm](/home-assistant/agriculture/organizing) page covers naming conventions that scale.
Rename the newly added device and entities now, before the system accumulates many more. Settings → Devices & Services → click the device → rename. Similarly rename each entity.
Create an area for the sensor's location (Greenhouse Zone 1 for example) and assign the device to it.
Step seven: Review user access.
The onboarding created one user — the administrator. For single-grower operations this may be enough. For operations with multiple people, additional users should be created with appropriate permission levels.
Settings → People → Users.
Add a user for each person who needs access. Each user gets their own username and password. Home Assistant's permission model is not sophisticated at this level (basic Home Assistant is single-tenant in spirit), but separating users matters for access control, for distinguishing whose actions are in the logs, and for future features.
For detailed user management including role-based access and multi-person operations, [User Management and Security](/home-assistant/operations/security) covers the depth.
For the first hour, confirming the administrator account's password is strong and, if the operation has multiple users, adding a second account is enough.
Step eight: Note what not to rush into.
Several capabilities are tempting in the first hour but better left for later when the system is stable and the grower's understanding has matured.
Many automations all at once. The grower should start with one or two simple automations after the first hour (perhaps in the first week) and build understanding. Adding twenty automations on day one produces a tangled system that is hard to debug when something goes wrong.
Complex dashboard customization. The default dashboard is serviceable. Elaborate dashboard design is a project of its own, worth doing when the monitoring data is flowing and the grower knows what they want to see. [Your First Dashboard](/home-assistant/getting-started/first-dashboard) covers the first iteration.
Remote access configuration. Exposing Home Assistant to the public internet requires care. Until the grower is certain about the security model, local-network access plus occasional VPN is safer than rushed remote access setup. [Remote Access](/home-assistant/operations/remote-access) covers the options.
Installing every interesting add-on. The add-on store is full of interesting options. Installing ten add-ons in the first hour leaves a cluttered system where it is unclear which add-ons are actually being used and which are experimental. Add add-ons deliberately as specific needs arise.
Commercial system integration. If the operation has a commercial control system, wiring Home Assistant into it is an advanced topic that should wait until the grower is comfortable with Home Assistant as a standalone system.
Cloud AI integration. Adding OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or Google Gemini as an integration is interesting but produces results only valuable when there is real data for the AI to work with. Add AI after the system is collecting meaningful sensor data.
Multi-site architectures. For operations with multiple sites, the question of "one Home Assistant for everything or one per site" matters but is premature in the first hour. Start with one installation serving one site; scale out later when the patterns are clearer.
The first hour is about a solid foundation: properly configured, backed up, accessible, and producing at least one real data stream. Expansion comes later.
Step nine: Take a deep breath.
Home Assistant is installed, configured, backed up, and reading real data. The grower has a mobile app that works and a dashboard that reflects the greenhouse (or wherever the first sensor lives). This is genuinely useful — more than many commercial agricultural monitoring systems provide at any price.
From here, the path is deliberate. The next additions — more sensors, more automations, more dashboards — are what [Your First Sensor](/home-assistant/getting-started/first-sensor), [Your First Automation](/home-assistant/getting-started/first-automation), and [Your First Dashboard](/home-assistant/getting-started/first-dashboard) cover in depth, each at a pace that lets the grower build understanding along with functionality.