Tips on writing and debugging template sensors

[hapim (Pim)]

See for instance an issue I’m having now, where I don’t know how to get information from home assistant to understand what is wrong:

Where can you put variables in your automation and state based trigger templates and template sensors

Can anybody tell where you can put a variables definition in: automations template sensors template triggers Reason for asking: I’ve been searching for an answer in the documentation and could not find it. Same goes as to where you can import jinja macro’s and where you can’t. I would like to know because I now seem to have gotten stuck in: not being able to import a jinja macro in a state based trigger action variable (is that correct?) not being able to define variables in a template s…

I did an import of my macro in the action / variables section.
All seemed fine until the first event fired and the template sensor died.
The log in home assistant stated:

Logger: homeassistant.helpers.sensor
Bron: helpers/trigger_template_entity.py:208
First occurred: 21:01:47 (12 gebeurtenissen)
Laatst gelogd: 22:15:40

    Error rendering state template for sensor.woonkamer_magic_cube: TemplateSyntaxError: Encountered unknown tag 'is_cube_event'. Jinja was looking for the following tags: 'endmacro'. The innermost block that needs to be closed is 'macro'.
    Error rendering state template for sensor.woonkamer_magic_cube: UndefinedError: 'cube' is undefined
    Error rendering state template for sensor.woonkamer_magic_cube: TypeError: unhashable type: 'list'
    Error rendering state template for sensor.woonkamer_magic_cube: UndefinedError: 'cube_face' is undefined

Note that most of the error lines in de log are old (I know this due to history of what I’ve done, the log entries itself as shown lack a timestamp which is definitely not helping)