A dashboard in Home Assistant provides the user interface to monitor and control your Home Assistant instance. They are extremely flexible, and there is quite a community around creating the fanciest dashboards you’ve ever seen. But with this great power comes great responsibility. It is easy to make mistakes in your dashboards, and it is not always easy to find them.
Spook enhances the dashboard integration of Home Assistant by raising repairs issues in case it detects something is wrong with a dashboard.
Devices & entities¶
Spook does not provide any new devices or entities for this integration.
Actions¶
Spook does not provide action enhancements for this integration.
Repairs¶
While Spook is floating around in your Home Assistant instance, it will raise repairs issues if it has found something that is not right.
Unknown referenced entities¶
Dashboards are inspected for the use of entities. If a dashboard uses an entity ID in one of its cards that does not exist, Spook will raise a repair issue. The repairs issue raised will contain the name of the dashboard and the entity ID that is referenced but not found.
Figure 1:Spook found an issue with an dashboard that is using non-existing entities.
To resolve the raised issue, you can either remove the reference to the non-existing entity ID or fix the referenced entity ID. Spook will automatically remove the repair issue once the issue is fixed.
Known limitations
Spook is not aware of all possible configuration for all possible cards. Especially with third-party cards, configuration can sometimes differ and Spook might not be able to detect the use of an unknown entity ID in such cases.
Unknown referenced areas¶
Dashboards are inspected for the use of areas. An area can be referenced in more than one way: by an area card, by the area view strategy, by the areas dashboard strategy listing areas to hide or order, and by an area_id used as the target of an action. Spook looks for all of them and raises a repair issue naming the dashboard and the areas that are missing.
What you see depends on where the reference sits, and the frontend decides that rather than Spook, so this page will not promise you a particular symptom. What Spook can tell you is which dashboard names which missing area, which is the part you need either way.
To resolve the raised issue, you can either remove the reference to the non-existing area or fix the referenced area. Spook will automatically remove the repair issue once the issue is fixed.
Missing dashboard resources¶
Dashboard resources tell Home Assistant which extra JavaScript and CSS files to load, which is how custom cards get there. Spook checks the ones it can: a resource served from /local/ or /hacsfiles/ maps to a file on disk, so Spook can see whether that file is there. If it is not, it will raise a repair issue listing the resources in question.
Resources on an external URL, or served by an integration, are deliberately skipped. Spook cannot verify those without going and asking, so it does not claim to.
A missing local resource usually means a custom card was removed but its resource stayed behind. The cost is paid on every page load, by every browser, for a file that is never going to arrive.
To resolve the raised issue, go to Settings > Dashboards > Resources and remove or correct these resources. Spook will automatically remove the repair issue once the issue is fixed.
Duplicate dashboard resources¶
The same resource can be listed more than once, and nothing in Home Assistant stops it: every resource you add is handed a fresh ID without anybody checking what it points at.
The usual way in is updating a custom card. The new version wants a new cache-busting URL, so /local/some-card.js?v=1 gains a neighbour at ?v=2 instead of being edited. Both stay. The browser treats two URLs as two files and loads both, the card tries to register itself twice, and the second attempt throws. What you see is a broken card, which sends you looking at the card rather than at the resource list.
Spook raises a repair issue naming each resource that appears more than once, and the URLs involved where they differ.
For a resource served from /local/ or /hacsfiles/ the path is a file on disk, so two URLs differing only in their query string are the same file and are reported as duplicates.
For any other resource, only an exact repeat counts. A query string on somebody else’s server can be the difference between two genuinely different files, and Spook is not going to guess that it is not.
The resource type is part of the comparison either way. Home Assistant loads a module differently from a css, so the same URL listed under two types is two instructions rather than one repeated, and Spook leaves those alone.
Spook raises one repair issue per duplicated resource, so they can be dealt with one at a time. Each one offers three ways out:
Clear the extra copies, keep the most recent. Spook removes every copy but the last one added, which for a card updated by adding a resource instead of editing one is the version you meant to end up with.
Let me fix it myself. Points you at Settings > Dashboards > Resources, and leaves the issue in place until you have.
Leave them, stop telling me. Keeps the resources as they are and stops Spook mentioning that one again.
Resources listed in YAML are static, so there is nothing Spook can delete for you there. Those duplicates are still reported, and choosing to fix one tells you which file to edit rather than offering a button that would quietly do nothing.
Spook will automatically remove the repair issue once the issue is fixed.
Feature requests, ideas, and support¶
If you have an idea on how to further enhance this integration, for example, by adding a new action entity, or repairs detection; feel free to let us know in our discussion forums.
Are you stuck using these new features? Or maybe you’ve run into a bug? Please check the Support page on where to go for help.