Deleting Devices in Home Assistant

As of the time of this posting there is not an easy way that I have found to delete devices from Home Assistant. Checking on-line it seems like the only way is to edit a core.device_registry file in a hidden folder. Yuck.

Well, OK, if I have to do that I want to make it as simple as possible. So here are the steps that I use:

First of all I have a couple of add-ons installed. The first is the simple file editor. I had been using the Visual Studio editor, but it started to cause issues with my installation so I started using this one.

Also I use the Terminal add on.

Step 1 – use the Integrations page to find the devices I want to remove. I disable them using the “edit” icon at the top of the page for the device. This is the icon you would use to rename the device. Below the name is a disable feature:

I click on the slider to disable the device.

After disabling all the devices I want to remove I open the Terminal. I change directory (cd) to the .storage folder. I then make a backup of the core.device_registry file. Then I copy the core.device_registry file up one folder so that the File editor can find it easily.

cd ~/config/.storage
cp core.device_registry core.device_registry.bak
cp core.device_registry ..

I now open the File Editor.

In the file editor I go to the folder view (which on my system defaults to the config folder). There I find the copied core.device_registry file.

I click on it and open it. I then go to the File Editor settings and change the edit mode to JSON. It defaults to YAML mode.

All of this just takes a few minutes. I am now ready to remove the items that I have disabled. I click on the search icon and search for “disabled_by”: “user”

I find each one and then move up to the start of the entry. Below shows the first line of the entry at line number 2766.

Since I am in json mode the line number has an expansion arrow on it. I click on the arrow to collapse the entry, and then I select the collapsed entry and delete it.

After deleting the block I am left with a blank line which I also delete, and then use the find feature to go to the next entry.

When all have been deleted I save the file and open the terminal again. I copy the modified file back to the .storage folder. Note that I am still in the .storage folder in the Terminal.

cp ../config.device_registry .

All that is left to do is to go to the Developer Tools YAML tab and check the configuration. If the tests passes you can then restart Home Assistant.

I find this the safest way for me. By disabling devices I make sure that I am finding and deleting the devices I want. By using the json mode and the expand/collapse feature I make sure I am not accidentally deleting too much.