HTTPS and Themes and perhaps more

Hi all

After running home assistant core for some years, I thought I’d try the hassos variant to get everything well integrated and so on. At first, it looks fine, but by second thoughts, it doesn’t look ready for much. I have managed to get in via ssh (through hidden menus etc) which is good, but why on earth would you create such a minimalistic OS when a base install of Debian or similar hardly takes any place and actually makes the OS usable? Anyway…

  • I have installed let’s encrypt and made a certificate - fine - but how do I configure hass to actually use that? I found something about manually editing configuration.yaml, which I did, and nearly bricked things.

  • Where can I find themes?

  • Are there any docs on what can be configured from the GUI and what will require manual configuration? If the manual config is done incorrenctly, it may be a missing space, there is, as far as I can see, no automatic recovery and you’ll need to ssh into the box to fix it (if you have setup ssh, that is, or else, you’re fscked)

I’m just wondering if I should keep struggling with this or just go back whence i came

Not sure I fully understand your process here, but I’ll try and help from what little I know (never used a HA Core installation):

  • If you are using Let’s Encrypt to get external access to your server via https, then you might as well do this from within the DuckDNS addon, which also takes care of the certificates. Or do you already have your HA domain name? In both cases you need to manually add it under the http: section of your configuration.yaml, as well as the paths to the key and certificate. By default, it looks something like this:
http:
  ssl_certificate: /ssl/fullchain.pem
  ssl_key: /ssl/privkey.pem
  • Themes are accessed via Profile (at the very bottom of the sidebar menu), which should bring up a themes dropdown amongst alot of other stuff. I guess you already know this, but you can install themes manually by creating a folder in your config folder, or via HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store) (puzzled why this isn’t just the same as for a HA Core installation)

  • Whether an integration is configured via yaml or the UI is entirely dependent on the integration, and this will be clearly indicated within the documentation for the integration itself e.g. the Speedtest integration, which was moved over from yaml to the UI a few releases ago.

Again, not entirely sure why this would be different for a core installation, but you can always run configuration check before applying any changes and restarting, and this should save you from incorrectly formatted yaml in your configuration file. (Configuration > Settings > Configuration validation). I’ve not personally experienced this, but I thought there was a safe mode which HAOS boots into if there are problems with configuration.yaml.

As you have SSL access, you could edit the yaml from the command line to correct any errors, or just take advantage of the Backups feature of the Supervisor, and restore a backup to get everything back. (I believe this feature is coming to non-supervised installations in the next release).

Hope this helps. (By the way, you might get more responses if you split your different questions into separate threads).

EDIT: I’ve also just realised that the base_url setting under http is obsolete. This is now set through th UI - Configuration > Settings > General Configuration, where you’'ll find setting for internal an external URL. Sorry for the fud ( I’ve used NGINX for a while, so not had this setting for ages).

I’m running my own DNS servers and I just used http auth to make the certificate, so that should be fine. Currently there’s no http section in the config file at all (see below). Where should I add it?

As for backups through the GUI, this is fine if the GUI works. Yesterday, I tried to configure http manually by just adding the http section to the end of the file, but that failed, making the GUI never to appear until I finally found the config file on disk after ssh login.

# Configure a default setup of Home Assistant (frontend, api, etc)
default_config:

# Text to speech
tts:
  - platform: google_translate

automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml

I couldn’t find a way to validate - pressing restart under server control just restarted it and it didn’t come up again until I manually edited the config file

I’ve a feeling you’re already beyond my limited knowledge, but the http integration is part of default_config, so it’s enabled by default, but obviously without any specific configuration. I’d just put it immediately below the default_config entry.

I’d check the documentation here.

EDIT: check my edit to my original answer - sorry if I’'ve been confusing)

Are you not seeing this button?

EDIT: you need to enable ‘Advanced Mode’ under your Profile (I assumed you’d already done this). Should add more possibilities to the Add-ons store as well.

Further thought - how are you editing your yaml files? HA is picky about line-feeds and spaces (no tabs!) so best to use the File editor add-on to start with (should be listed in the Official add-ons part of the add-on store)

Thanks - I think I figured it out now. One more thing - if I choose dark mode in my profile and log out and in again, it goes back to the default. I have no specific themes installed, it just uses the defaults, but dark mode works until I log out. Any idea?

Not sure - you can tick a ‘Remember this login’ when you login, so maybe this is part of what gets saved in a cookie or something?

As far as I’m aware, chosen Dashboard and theme views are local per device rather than universal per user.

hrmf - that could have been better. I just doublechecked with my old install and logged out manually, and you’re right - it falls back to the default. Should I file a bug about this?