Repeated "ERROR no 'appdaemon' section in /conf/appdaemon.yaml" in Docker container

[marthocoo (Mark Coombes)]

I’m using the latest acockburn/appdaemon image and am getting the error ERROR no ‘appdaemon’ section in /conf/appdaemon.yaml in my container logs (and obviously AppDaemon is not working). There is an appdaemon.yaml at that location (I can get into the container and see it there), but the section isn’t titled “appdaemon”, it’s titled “AppDaemon” - anyone know if this is safe to change or if there was some kind of breaking change I’m not aware of re the config file?

[aimc (Andrew Cockburn)]

You probably have 3.0 beta 2 - there wer many breaking changes in the first beta:

Announcement - AppDaemon 3.0 beta 1!

TL;DR - AppDaemon 3.0 is here - it’s a beta and it brings a few breaking changes - in particular, python 3.4 is no longer supported. Please read on for more detail. NOTE: The link to the beta docs is here: http://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ If you want the old version 2 docs, they can be found here: http://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ Hi all - it’s been a little while but I am hoping the wait will be worth it - introducing AppDaemon 3.0 beta1! In addition to some new functio…

Make sure you are referencing the most up to date docs, listed that the top of that thread.

[marthocoo (Mark Coombes)]

Thanks for the pointer to the new docs. Aside from my original problem (clearly there are config changes I need to accommodate), I think there may be a bug in your Docker image… I’m following the “latest” version of the Docker instructions at http://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/DOCKER_TUTORIAL.html.

As a test I moved my appdaemon directory somewhere else and created a new empty directory, then started the container as instructed in the docs:

docker run --name=appdaemon -d -p 5050:5050 \
  --restart=always \
  -e HA_URL="http://192.168.88.10:8123" \
  -e HA_KEY="[my API key]" \
  -e DASH_URL="http://$HOSTNAME:5050" \
  -v /opt/appdaemon:/conf \
  acockburn/appdaemon:latest

The Docker logs for my appdaemon container now state:

2018-01-30 16:04:54.127988 WARNING AppDaemon: HASS: Disconnected from Home Assistant, retrying in 5 seconds

I took a look at /opt/appdaemon/appdaemon.yaml and this is all the file contains:

log:
  logfile: STDOUT
  errorfile: STDERR
appdaemon:
  threads: 10
  plugins:
    HASS:
      type: hass
      ha_url:
      ha_key:

The docs state (as they did for version 2) that “If your conf folder is brand new, the Appdaemon Docker will copy the default configuration files into this folder. If there are already configuration files, it will not overwrite them. Double check that the files are there now.”

So I’m not sure what’s gone wrong - maybe the environment variables aren’t present in the default config files residing in the container, so my custom values aren’t making it into appdaemon.yaml? And furthermore, since I specified the DASH_URL env var I would expect that the image would add the hadashboard: and dash_url: directives to appdaemon.yaml?