The JSONDb files are text See the post by @sihui earlier in this thread.
Yes but what kind of new users? Do those sort end up contributing to the community? Improving it? I am sure some do. But I don’t think it’s good strategy (for long term health of community) to alienate power users, who in my experience (over many years, decades even, and many fora) typically become the backbone of said community.
EDIT: Forgot to add, I love OpenHAB and care about it and want to see the project continue to thrive (although in a sustainable way) and this is a big motivation for my comments (in addition to personal/selfish ones).
I realize you are perhaps somewhere between making a joke and/or implying these are relics of a bygone era. However lately I have actually become quite interested in the “small web”, things like Gemini and related protocols, as the castles of proprietary JavaScript and walled gardens of the “modern web” are absolute cancer IMO.
Those who can spread the popularity of OH, possibly contribute other that development & possibly encourage other new users who can develop in Java?
Lazy programmers? ( Remember, that is why they write a program.)
I do not know Java but am active supporting the Z-Wave binding database and other parts.
Yes I got this now, but this seems more like a workaround for me.
Sometimes I just drop the userdata dir to start clean again, but now this would not be possible. After start I had to overwrite the specific files.
Also one part of my backup is the conf dir, with this I would have to use the cli for the addiotional backup of the ui.
Whats next?
This is getting pretty complex unnecessarily.
There is plenty of room for mistakes. While editing something in the browser I will forget to backup the changes 2 out of 3 times, especially if I do some minor changes in a month from now…
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Perhaps I can explain this. And again, I speak only for me, but it seems that “some” others have a similar opinion.
The new UI is much better then the old Paper UI in openHAB 2. With the model I had done today, my family can use the Webbrowser of there mobile devices easy and understandable, without knowing the details behind.
I, as the adminstrator, can also check for every thing and every item, if I had done the things correct.
And I can test parts without destroying my running main system. For example, I bought the last days before Christmas a Velux KLF200 gateway. I setup in a virtual Maschine on my iMac a second openHAB 3 instance and integrate with one velux.things and one velux.items file the settings for our installation. After testing everything, I had only copied this two files into my main openHAB 3 installation and the work was done.
O could not see any similar way to test and configure a single binding separate with the UI driven way.
Additional, I have Alexa integration and Homekit is on the ToDo. Also here I use the new and comfortable UI to check every single change.
So it makes a lot of sense to define configurations in text files. And when I think about it, the trend to flat file CMS systems has also the reason in easy administration in comparison to data base cms.
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My apologies (and kudos!) to Yannick then!
This is exactly the problem I try to address. I understand perfectly well those who prefer GUI. However the reciprocal of that often does not seem to be the case around here. This is an alarming trend to me, and why I decide to voice my concerns.
But more to your specific point, I suspect many of us are like “admin” or “home IT” support, and then we have “users” (wife, kids, friends, family, guests, etc.). So those of us who are administering the system have our preferred tools, even if many of other users of same system use other interfaces (voice, web, GUI, etc.).
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That‘s not the point, the last post here had been about configuring the UI itself, e.g. the pages section.
I was not talking about configuring things and items.
The JSONDB files have it‘s own backup and you can configure, even textual, how many backups should be kept.
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I absolutely understand, but especially creating the UI for my family to use, I love to be able to use the UI on my iPad to modify it. Can‘t imagine to do this text based.
And where is the Backup located?
In the same shelf is not really cool if the whole house is burning…
That is why we leave it up to you to automatically copy it to your offsite backup location or disaster recovery site. 
If the house is burning, aren’t your automated devices burning too??
No, that is the point. Because this was only a small example of the complete configuration-set in the openhab-conf folder is stored. The same belongs to the persistent configuration, the sitemap, which I use for the openHAB App (iOS).
I also did not install any binding over the UI, I add this in the addons.cfg. So when saving, openHAB install the binding by itself. So I support theKBro.
So perhaps, like I accept the arguments pro UI driven workflow, the others can accept that users like us have the wish for 100% support for text file configuration.
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EPL licensed software can be forked. You are then free to implement that. I do not know id PRs addinf that to OH would be considered.
Even if I repeat myself, it is absolutely fine to configure your openHAB 3 installation via text files. This has not changed since 2.x and there are no plans to change. So nothing was taken away.
Is there missing any config option? Apart from the UI itself (which we had just today), I don‘t think so. If it is, and I asked this some posts ago, let us know, might be that what you are looking for is just not documented actually.
Oh Bruce, please. That cannot be a real answer to a my wish to accept other opinion.
Please read again the Tutorial Overview from openHAB 3.
Bulk changing, sharing and synchronization configuration, examples in documentation, …
They are official reasons to do this and all we wish is a complete support. In openHAB 3 is the pages part missing and that is, why we have the discussion.
If you don’t want to configure over text files, fine. I don’t will speak against you. But learn to respect other opinions.
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Perhaps, but like theKBro said, there is no folder “pages” in openhab-conf. So the hope dies last, but in the moment I did not see this.
I use text files personally, except for Things & UI.
The same as Text files you need to backup these files
Using the cli to backup you sudo openhab-cli backup
Note it tells you where this backup is made. You can backup however often you like.
The default jsondb backup is 5 and this way copies your backup folder.
It also saves all your persistence data.
It dose not save your TXT config files.
You can change where these backups are stored.
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I’ll give this a try, thanks!
It would still be nice to have the possibility to config the pages via openhab-config pages files besides the config via gui.
So my experience about this:
I am using OH3 with docker → till now I only have to mount the openhab-conf volume and thats it.
Additionally mounting the userdata would not be a big problem either, so I could also directly access the files I am additionally interested in e.g. users.json, uicomponents_ui_page.json, openhabcloud/secret and uuid
But using the backup is more complicated:
I am using docker-compose to start all services needed by openhab too. e.g. influxdb and mosquitto.
I was very satisfied with this setup, because it’s pretty simple and all dependencies and the data to persist are shown in the compose file.
Have to use the backup call will break the simplicity of my setup!
openhab-cli isn’t even provided inside the container and exec into my docker (I have to find out how to call backup without openhab-cli) with an external task is also kind of an overkill in my opinion.
Then I have to mount the backup dir and so on. The configuration is getting more and more complicated.
In my opinion it would be a huge improvement if there would be a possibility to configure users, pages and openhabcloud via openhab-conf files and handle it as readonly in the gui if configured via files just like its done with things and items.
I will always prefere KISS! For the users keep it simple stupid and standardize the possible configurations.
Thats why I personally dislike mixing things up.
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