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Installation #

Before we are getting started on anything, make you sure you make a backup of you current Home Assistant setup.

Dwains Dashboard highly depends on HA groups If you don’t know how to work with groups, read this first.

With groups you can combine multiple entities into one. For example you have 3 lights in your living room light.living_room_1, light.living_room_2 and a switch switch.living_room_3. You can combine these in 1 group as follow:

living_room_lights:
  name: Living Room Lights
  entities: 
    - light.living_room_1
    - light.living_room_2
    - switch.living_room_3

You then can use group.living_room_lights in my dashboard config.

Short explanation on Dwains Dashboard #

My dashboard has the slogan “An auto generating Home Assistant Lovelace UI Dashboard”. You still need to define your house in so called ‘Dwains Dashboard Config files’. Working with these files is not that hard and is fully explained in the docs here. The dashboard will be automatic generated on the basis of these config files.

If you experience any problems during the installation of Dwains Dashboard then please join my Discord server, you get live personal support. Join my Discord Server here, it’s 100% free!

You can install Dwains Dashboar manual or through HACS, below is the manual installation instruction.

Step 1 - Download Dwains Dashboard latest release #

Download the latest release from the release page.

Initialize the download by clicking on the “Source code (zip)” link at the bottom of the page.

Github

Step 2 - Extract the content #

  1. Unzip the file you just downloaded.
  2. Inside this folder you will see a folder called custom_components copy this folder.
  3. Go to the main folder of your Home Assistant installation. This is the folder where you config is. (Hint: its the folder where for example the files ui-lovelace.yaml and configuration.yaml are located).
  4. Paste the custom_components to the main folder of your Home Assistant installation.

You will end up with having /config/custom_components/dwains_dashboard or if you are running a venv installation it would look like /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/custom_components/dwains_dashboard.

Step 3 - Restart Home Assistant #

Restart Home Assistant once before moving to the next step.

Step 4 - Activate Dwains Dashboard #

  1. In your Home Assistant UI go to “Configuration”, then click “Integrations”.
  2. Click on the “+” button in the bottom right corner.
  3. Search for or scroll down to find “Dwains Dashboard” and select it.

There will be a new icon (a D icon) in your left sidebar.

If you don’t see a D icon in your left sidebar something went wrong. Please check your HA error log and ask for support on the HA forum or on my Discord Server.

Step 5- Access your new Dwains Dashboard #

Click in your left sidebar on the new icon D, to access Dwains Dashboard. If you see an red error message then please clear your browser cache or mobile app cache. On windows you can do CTRL + F5 and on Apple you can do Hold ⇧ Shift and click the Reload button. Or, hold down ⌘ Cmd and ⇧ Shift key and then press R.

Step 6 - Configure Dwains Dashboard #

To configure/build the dashboard you need to edit the files in the folder dwains-dashboard/configs/. When you open these file you see some examples commented-out, only uncomment the lines you want to use! If you want to know how you need to configure these files, go to the Configure Dwains Dashboard page.

HINT

Some settings can be changed in the Home Assistant Integration page - these include the language and the name / icon of the Dashboard (as it appears in the Home Assistant sidebar).

If you want to extend or add custom things like custom pages or cards to this dashboard, please refer to the addons documentation.

That’s it! Dwains Dashboard should now be installed.

PS: Ceckout some Tips & Tricks of Dwains Dashboard.