Location for items and thing created on PaperUI

Setup, Configuration and Use Items & Sitemaps
1

hello everyone, i’m sorry if i didn’t find any topic about my question, i’m sure there is but i sure missed it.
i’ve got a simple question: i have installed a binding (in this case opendaikin binding) and i’ve had to create things and then item from paperui. now i would like to find my items text line from “nano” console.
can anyone tell me the path (and filename) where are stored all entries done from PaperUI?

thanks a lot

2 
/var/lib/openhab2/jsondb/org.eclipse.smarthome.core.items.Items.json

NOTE, the information is stored in a completely different format from what is documented in the docs for .items files.

Do not edit this file while OH is running.

3

perfect! thank you! i’ve created items and thing manually via text editor but the binding wouldn’t recognize channel linking, so i had to switch to paperui linking.
now i would like to delete all items/thing and create them manually again using sintax shown in the path you told me.

thanks a lot!

4

You theoretically can create Items and Things in the JSONDB manually, but that file is not intended to be edited manually. Note that the file cannot be edited while OH is running. Also note you can’t create .items and .things files in this JSON format in your /etc/openhab2 folder.

5

I was wondering the same thing. I have a BINDING which I had to manually add to “/usr/share/openhab2/addons” folder… and it installed fine, and found 93 “THINGS” via autodiscovery associated with this BINDING (Omnilink).

I added several items manually into my .items file, including the correct channel info… but these items don’t work unless I manually ADD the THING using PaperUI via its inbox. Yikes.

So I am guessing I HAVE TO MANUALLY add by a click on each desired THING in the PaperUI inbox… in order for the item to work properly in my sitemap.

I too wanted a way to have them all in the file so when I re-build my entire openHAB2 system on a new hardware… I would simply copy my cfg and .sitemap and .items etc files.

Is manually adding each of these 93 things via PaperUI the correct way to do this?
THANKS Rich for all your great answers in this forum!

Dave

6

Did you accept the Thing from the Inbox? Autodiscovery is a two step process. First it finds the devices and adds them to the Inbox. Then you need to accept them from the Inbox before they become part of your OH configuration.

I’m pretty certain there is a REST call you can make to accept them all. Or you can do it from the Karaf console. I could be wrong.

Once they are accepted from the Inbox, they get written to the JSONDB. Any backup/configuration control that you create needs to include the JSONDB as well as /etc/openhab2 to capture both autodiscovered/PaperUI created Things and Items and Links as well as what is in the text config files.

I source control everything in /etc/openhab2 and everything in /var/lib/openhab2 except for cache, tmp, backups (only will exists for Docker OH) and persistence. This will capture the full range of configuration of OH.

7

Thank You. I guess its okay to have some critical info in my manually created files within /etc/openhab2… and then also have the PaperUI added things within /var/lib/openhab2 directories.

I was kinda wanting to have a “clean” install and everything all together… but this approach will also work fine and I’ll just make sure I backup both locations as you stated for a full configuration backup! THANKS AGAIN!
Dave

8

Unfortunately, that really isn’t feasible. For example, if you need to customize the logger, the config file for that is in /var/lib/openhab2/etc.

But what you can do is check both folders into the same repo, and then check them out to some location like /opt/openhab2. Then soft link /opt/openahab2/conf to /etc/openhab2 and /opt/openhab2/userdata to /var/lib/openhab2.