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.
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.