home-assistant.io/source/developers/development_validation.markdown

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layout	title	description	date	sidebar	comments	sharing	footer
page	Validate the input	Validation of entries in configuration.yaml	2016-08-11 20:00	true	false	true	true

The configuration.yaml file contains the configuration options for components and platforms. To ensure that the given configuration provided by the user is valid we use voluptuous to check it. Certain entries are optional or could be required for the setup of a platform or a component. Others must be of a certain type or out of an already defined list. This will ensure that the users are notified if something is wrong with a platform or component setup before Home Assistant is running.

Beside the voluptuous default types are a bunch of custom types available. To get a full overview take a look at the config_validation.py helper.

• Types: string, byte, and boolean
• Entity ID: entity_id and entity_ids
• Numbers: small_float and positive_int
• Time: time, time_zone
• Misc: template, slug, temperature_unit, latitude, longitude, isfile, sun_event, ensure_list, and icon

To validate plaforms using MQTT there are valid_subscribe_topic and valid_publish_topic present.

{% linkable_title Snippets %}

This section contains a couple of snippets for the validation we use.

{% linkable_title Default name %}

DEFAULT_NAME = 'Sensor name'

PLATFORM_SCHEMA = vol.Schema({
    ...
    vol.Optional(CONF_NAME, default=DEFAULT_NAME): cv.string,

{% linkable_title Port %}

As all port numbers are coming out of the range 1 till 65535 a range check should be performed.

DEFAULT_PORT = 993

PLATFORM_SCHEMA = vol.Schema({
    [...]
    vol.Optional(CONF_PORT, default=DEFAULT_PORT):
        vol.All(vol.Coerce(int), vol.Range(min=1, max=65535)),

{% linkable_title Sensor types %}

If a sensor has a pre-defined list of available options it should be tested if the configuration entry matches it.

SENSOR_TYPES = {
    'article_cache': ('Article Cache', 'MB'),
    'average_download_rate': ('Average Speed', 'MB/s'),
}

PLATFORM_SCHEMA = vol.Schema({
    ....
    vol.Optional(CONF_MONITORED_VARIABLES, default=[]):
        [vol.In(SENSOR_TYPES)],