Exposing items to Cloud

Hello, I am unable to see most of my items in the cloudconnector config, under the services menu. I have them defined in a text file. Everything within openhab works, and the connector is online. I tried to expose in the .config file as well, but it still is not exposing the one test item.

Exposing Items to the cloud service was turned off some time ago because too many users are exposing all their Items for no reason what-so-ever causing the service to go down frequently under the load.

If you are not using IFTTT, there is no need to expose any Items at all.

If you do want to integrate with IFTTT, you will need to host your own instance of the Cloud Sever and follow How To: Integrate Custom openHAB Cloud with IFTTT.

I want to use the amazon skill

The GA docs has an explicit warning that you do not need to expose the Items using the cloud connector config. It appears the Alexa docs do not have a similar warning, but it also doesn’t tell you to expose the Items either. Adding the proper metadata is sufficient.

Ok, I was figuring since a requirement was to use the cloud connector, I’d have to expose…Thanks Rich.

Maybe there can be some improvements made to the docs to make it more clear that it isn’t required. This is a common pitfall that users encounter when configuring GA (despite the explicit warning in the docs) and Alexa. Do you have any suggestions for what might have helped you?

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Well, I cannot ge amazon to find my openhab instance…the cloud connector is connected to the amazon skill, but it cannot find the openhab instance…

I can’t help with that part. All I know is:

  • exposing Items is only required by IFTTT
  • exposing Items has been turned off for quite some time now (six months or so)
  • lots of people have successfully set up new Alexa configurations since exposing Items was turned off

I can’t say what the problem you are experiencing is nor how to fix it, but I can say it’s not caused by a lack of exposed Items.

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