More useful logs during startup

Feature Requests
,
1

Most restarts fail (frozen) with the only feedback of a standard notification:

Starting [xyz integration], not everything will be available until it is finished

Once frozen, attempts at command line:

ha core restart

results in:

Error: Another job is running for job group home_assistant_core

It would be helpful if the logs or a dedicated ‘Startup’ log contained detailed step-by-step of actions it is taking so the last action (causing failure) could be observed.

It would also be helpful if those steps could be observed from notifications on screen during startup so it becomes obvious that the startup has either failed or is just taking a really long time.

An alternative to a startup log file is to allow logger to output user-defined logging to separate files.

2

Does sshing in and running

tail -f config/home-assistant.log

work for you?

3

Here are the results of that command. I can’t find anything helpful.

Screenshot 2024-01-13 143955
Screenshot 2024-01-13 1439551114×390 19.8 KB

This is my latest attempt to restart core. I still can’t get it working after at lease a dozen attempts and can’t find any help from logs.

4

Ok, try the whole lot. But please, the text, not a photo.

5

Sure. See this link (too large to paste here): home-assistant.log - Google Drive

6

So did it complete start up that time?

7

It did not complete startup. This was during an attempt to re-install everything and after 7 Add-ons and only 2 Integrations (I restarted after each Add-on and Integration install). The last thing installed was ESPHome which had been running fine since originally installed over 6 months ago and no changes.

8

Does a bare installation (before adding add-ons) start ok?

When you say you added 2 integrations, do you mean via hacs? HA comes with more than 2600 integrations. Did you need something specific outside ha?

9

  1. Yes, started ok as a bare installation. I added the SSH/Terminal, Samba, and DuckDNS Add-ons and saved that in a VM as my template so I didn’t have to install these every time. As I can add more, I will do the same since this is taking many days to find the problem.

  2. Integrations added were Google Nest and ESPHome from the Integrations page (not from HACS).

  3. Not sure your question “Did you need something specific outside ha”. I haven’t gotten to any of the integrations I need from HACS yet. Just trying to get my basic installation back first.

10

Understood. I see you mention vm. How exactly did you install HA, and on what hardware?

Those logs mention something about recorder startup not finishing. Other than that, I’d need a lot of time to read it all.

11

Running on a Windows 10 machine. VirtualBox (Windows - Home Assistant). This installation has been running well for over 6 months with maybe 15 different HA integrations, plus several HACS integrations.

I’m just starting over with installation because I can’t get my backup to work and don’t know what is causing it.

As you are finding and my original post was that feedback like “recorder started, but didn’t finish” is not helping to isolate the problem.

Also, I just reinstalled again with the same configuration as the log file you now have and it is working fine now, including restarts. Go figure…

12

Is there a way to restart in safe mode from the command line (ssh putty terminal)?

13

It would be nice to have better feedback (like progress, errors, etc) notification and logging during the startup process and options to restart with selective Add-on’s and integrations. Would also be nice to ‘kill’ from the GUI and restart with these options.