I am looking at the documentation and find it difficult to use, likely b/c it is a bit out of date. I can certainly appreciate the difficulty in keeping it updated, being a retired software dev myself.
One example is using the editor. After finding “Add ons” in “Apps” with search, installation was easy and the toggle to show it in the dashboard was too. In the docs (Common tasks - Operating System - Home Assistant) it says to " open the Configuration tab and disable the Enforce basepath option." There is no such tab and I don’t see one in the menu, or anything related to an “*Enforce basepath” option. From what I read there are standard folders for HA, such as /config for configuration.yaml, but clicking on the upper left hand folder icon doesn’t use those names, making it difficult to follow docs that reference the standard folders such as /config.
Ok, I found some answers on the editor’s installation page under Apps, not within the editor where I was looking. The installation page has tabs for various things and a toggle widget for the “*Enforce basepath” option under the configuration tab. Another tab is for Documentation, although it’s rather small.
I have several CircuitSetup 6 channel energy monitors from which I am trying to get some of the 51 entities each monitor defines to surface on the dashboard. I would also like to remove some of the items on the builtin Overview dashboard. Some docs describe editing the configuration.yaml to do that, but I see zero correlation between the dashboard and the small amount of info in the default configuration.yaml file.
I am open to all suggestions on how best to climb the HA learning curve.
Thanks to everyone here and the the devs that make HA the wonderful open source, linux based app that it is!
This month’s update brought a number of changes including renaming “Add-Ons” to “Apps” and switching from the legacy masonry-style Overview to the new sections-style Overview.
The tab in question is in the File Editor App’s settings.
Are you using the legacy Overview or the current one?
The legacy view looks like what can be seen in the first example here: Edit the dashboard - Home Assistant . That page contains instructions on how to edit that type of dashboard.
The current Overview can be seen in this months Release notes: 2026.2: Home, sweet overview - Home Assistant. There are very limited options when it comes to editing the contents of the current “sections-style” Overview. Basically you can assign items to the Favorites section by clicking the pencil in the top right of the page. There is no way to remove sections.
You do not need to do anything in your configuration.yaml file to edit dashboards.
Thank you for that information, it was very helpful.
I’m using ha version 17, downloaded the other day. Since I can’t remove items from the builtin Overview dashboard, it seems I’ll need to create a new dashboard. will I need to use the yaml editor to do that? Any why is the default HA configuration so small? Most references to it look much larger.
Back in the Before-times, we had to put almost everything in configuration.yaml. Over time, more and more things have been updated so they can be “configured” through the UI or are automatically handled by the default_config integration. But, some things haven’t been moved or can be configured both ways. So real-world examples (especially from people who have been using HA a long time) may show very different configuration.yaml files.
After looking at the default configuration.yaml, I see it’s mostly a series of includes for the separate split out files you mentioned. I definitely prefer this modular approach.
I got side-tracked with setting up automatic backups. I am going to store them on the host op sys though an NFS mount. Should be possible but I can’t get HA to mount the NFS share, athough I tested it. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
created the NFS share on the host with rw permissions
defined a “host_ip” entry in the host’s /etc/hosts file for the host’s IP address. Since DHCP can change that, I also created a systemd service to keep it updated
tested mounting the NFS share on the host’s /mnt point which was successful
under backup settings–> locations–> manage network storage–> add network storage I tried to configure an NFS network storage location but it failed. Need to figure out why. The logs say “Failed to to call /mounts … or systemd unit mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-backup2NFS.mount for details.”
I’m not sure how to access systemd info on haos. I looked in the web UI and in the ha cli but don’t see any systemd related commands. Perhaps I missed them or they’re under a different name? The haos logs don’t provide any further info, and I don’t see any errors on the host.
I replaced host_ip server name with the numeric host IP address and got a different error: Could not unmount backups2NFS due to: Transaction for mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-backups2NFS.mount/stop is destructive (mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-backups2NFS.mount has ‘start’ job queued, but ‘stop’ is included in transaction).
That says “unmount”. I thought perhaps a previous attempt created a conflict causing this error, so I restarted HA, cleared browser cache but same error occurs. Due to the host’s DHCP IP address, I need to find a way to resolve the entries in the host’s /etc/host file. It seems that isn’t occurring, given the difference of errors I see between using the host_ip name and actual host IP address.
Comment: Operating systems usually don’t like disappearing drives, especially if they are expecting to write to them before they are abruptly pulled out from under them, especially with reboots. Same as forcing your automatic transmission in Park when driving along the autobahn - bolts and shrapnel are going to fall out the bottom of your car. Strongly not recommended.
Is the hosts file the only option for you to allocate a Static IP Address? Cannot you do that from your router too in the DHCP configuration section?
Have you configured DNS correctly? You shouldn’t need to play with the hosts file in normal operations.
Are you using the vendor documentation, direct from the source, or third party, and possibly LLM generated slop?
If the vendor documentation is outdated, please bring it to their attention. If others, maybe re-evaluate their reliability to keep up to date in this fast paced world of Home Automation where everything changes frantically, and even ChatGPT and other so-called intelligence struggles to keep up to date.
You will find you develop a habit of carefully reading the release notes before blindly hitting the Update button - that is where the hidden gems are to be found.
Of course, but we’re only talking about a backup file, and the likelihood of the DHCP lease renewal of the HA host op sys occurring during the backup is so rare as not to be of concern.
I intend to set address reservation in the router, but I’m configuring & testing in a different network. I prefer not to alter DNS or rely on it for this purpose. I am not playing with the hosts file, I’m using it for a local lookup that doesn’t rely on DNS.
I presume the docs linked on the homeassistant website are kept up to date. I would only go to github or the projects repo to double check the docs once I am experienced enough with the project to do so. With many projects, especially open source projects, it’s not unusual for docs to be out of date with the code. I believe that’s the case here. I can see there have been some significant changes in the UI from what I’ve read here on the forum and various documentation files. There are many references to sections of the configuration.yaml file for example that are no longer present by are included into it from other yaml files. That is a good change IMHO.
Thanks for that tip! I will keep it in mind
Studying what cifs is I verified the current version of haos doesn’t allow a nfs mount type, despite NFS being one of the choices in the UI. So I will have to use samba (cifs). I’ll do that tomorrow and resume my dashboard configuration after I get automatic backups going with samba shares.
Thanks. I haven’t used smb in a many years. I was using the server’s path as the share value rather than the [HA_Backups] share name all the server settings were under. I also had to open the host’s firewall and figure out I didn’t need all the systemd crap I created to keep the host’s /etc/hosts file updated. .local is all I used for the server name which does track DHCP changes I need right now for testing, until I deploy the system in situ where I’ll use DHCP address reservation so hostname won’t change.
I never did get NFS working. When the cli mounts said --type nfs was invalid I gave up. I had other errors as well that expressed as regex failures but I resolved all of my mistakes but couldn’t figure out why it rejected --type nfs, unless the arg is case sensitive (I didn’t try NSF, but if that was why it failed it would be an easy fix in the HA cli code).
