Installing the HADashboard on Home Assistant

After having used Home Assistant for a few weeks I wondered whether these was a “nicer” front end or dashboard. A bit of Googling and I found this…. https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ecosystem/hadashboard/.

This takes you to the install for Appdaemon here https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/DASHBOARD_INSTALL.html. This then directs you to the install site here https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/packages/.

Installing Appdaemon

The instructions are pretty clear to start with.

1. Install appdaemon using pip3 ($ sudo pip3 install appdaemon)

but then it gets a little confusing (well to me) as it starts discussing development builds etc and then goes down to running the app and indicates a link to /home/homeassistant/conf.
Well on checking I do not have that directory.

So you then need to go back to the 2nd link I posted above. https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/DASHBOARD_INSTALL.html and look firther down the are some instructions in a different section called configuration. https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/CONFIGURE.html follow the instructions there.

Set up a new directory /home/homeassistant/conf
Create appdaemon.yaml and populate this
Go to Home Assistant and create a Long Lived Access Token. The instructions on how to do this are on the same page but at the bottom
Update the appdaemon.yaml with this token
Skips over the section on Filters (I guess in the future I may come back to this)
MQTT is added
Test App added

Back to the installation instructions and changes made to get the service starting at boot time.

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/appdaemon@appdaemon.service
Create the file replacing the user bit %I and the <full path to config directory>

[Unit]
Description=AppDaemon
After=home-assistant@homeassistant.service
[Service]
Type=simple
User=%I
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/appdaemon -c <full path to config directory>
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable appdaemon@appdaemon.service –now
$ sudosystemctl start appdaemon@appdaemon.service

Installing the Dashboard

Now back here https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/DASHBOARD_INSTALL.html.

The appdaemon.yaml file need updating again. This time with

hadashboard:  
  dash_url: http://192.168.1.20:5050
  dash_ssl_certificate: /etc/letsencrypt/live/somehost/fullchain.pem
  dash_ssl_key: /etc/letsencrypt/live/somehost/privkey.pem
  dash_password: !secret dash_password
  dashboard_dir: /home/homeassistant/conf/dashboards

Add a new directory /home/homeassistant/conf/dashboards and create a new file hello.dash and add this to it:

##
## Main arguments, all optional
##
title: Hello Panel
widget_dimensions: [120, 120]
widget_margins: [5, 5]
columns: 8

label:
    widget_type: label
    text: Hello World

layout:
    - label(2x2)

You can now navigate to the url e.g. http://192.168.1.20:5050.

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