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Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
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The problem that everyone is trying to say is there is no straight forward a through z step-by-step process for OH because everyone’s steps are completely different.

openHABian does a fantastic job of doing automatically for you all the step by step tasks to get OH installed and running on a Raspberry Pi. If you start with the image, after about 30 minutes you will have a fully installed OH with samba and all the other settings necessary for OH to work with a variety of technologies.

It takes care of everything and includes installation and configuration of a lot of common ancillary software like Samba and Mosquitto for MQTT.

This is why we recommend openHABian so heavily for new users. Step 1 is just “install openHABian” image.

But after this point step 2 could be one of a thousand different steps depending on what exactly you want to build with OH.

So let’s assume you want to set up MQTT as your first step. If you used openHABian, you would already have Mosquitto installed and configured, or can do so now easily by running openhabian-config and browsing the menus until you find Mosquitto.

Now you need something in OH that can talk to the MQTT broker from OH. These add-ons are called Bindings and they serve as a bridge between OH and whatever technology or API you are interacting with. There are two flavors of bindings, 1.x version bindings which are older bindings written before OH 2 was released and which have not been rewritten to take advantage of 2.x concepts (i.e. Things, Channels, and configuration through PaperUI).

Most everything you need to know to create an Item config for a given binding is documented in the binding’s README. For MQTT you can find that here:

https://docs.openhab.org/addons/bindings/mqtt1/readme.html

You can also find a lot of information by searching the Forum. There are tons of examples. For MQTT, the best posting is MQTT Binding (v1.11) Getting Started 101.

But to make my point again, step 2 for me when I first set up openHAB was getting Zwave working. Other user’s step 2 could have been getting KNX working, or HomeKit, or something else. This is why there is no step-by-step process to provide. After step 1 everyone is on a different path. So the best I can offer is:

  1. Install using openHABian: http://docs.openhab.org/installation/openhabian.html, though even here, everyone will want to run different. I for one run in Docker on a VM.

  2. Review the Beginner’s Guide and Concepts section of the User’s Guide and make sure you understand some of the key concepts: Items, Things, Channels, Bindings, etc.

  3. Choose the binding you want to configure first. You have over 200 to choose from.

  4. Install the chosen binding.

  5. Configure the binding as documented in the readme

  6. Create or accept Things from the Inbox where applicable as documented in the binding README

  7. Create Items as defined in the binding README.

  8. Start to explore Rules, sitemaps, HABPanel. and Persistence as needed.

I can’t be more specific than this because step 4 onward is going to be specific to the chosen binding.

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