My nightmare with ESP8266 and openhab

It’s actually complicated.

Which ones?

To answer that we need much more information. Elias and sihui have provided some examples which hopefully will help.

The general way to be successful in OH is:

  1. Understand the concepts (Things, Items, Channels, Links, Rules, etc). To do that you need to read the docs.

  2. Understand the base technology at least a little bit. In this case MQTT. A wikipedia level understanding is usually all that’s needed. You probably have this step down.

  3. Read the binding docs for the binding you are using. For many technologies, MQTT being one, there are two or more add-ons. A 1.x version and a 2.x version and sometimes additional Action add-ons. You need to be sure of which binding you’ve installed (note: when there is a 2.x version of a binding, the 1.x version is hidden by default unless you check the Show Legacy 1.x option in PaperUI or on the add-ons search page of the docs. Make sure that what ever configuration you are are trying to use matches the version of the binding you are trying to use. If you see an item with { mqtt=">[... you are looking at an MQTT v1 configuration which will not work with v2. If you see talk about Things and Channels, you are dealing with a v2 binding. When searching the forum, only pay attention to those posts that explicitly mention it’s for v2 (2.5, 2.4, v2, etc).

In general, no, there isn’t one end-to-end guide. Such a guide is impossible. See How to get started (there is no step-by-step tutorial) for an full discussion of why and a list of a whole bunch of getting started resources you can use.

For MQTT in particular, there are a number of tutorial postings various users have made. OpenHAB 2.4 MQTT beginner experience *principal conclusions* from a post-newbie