Home Assistant Dashboard Not Loading

In this tutorial, you'll learn about Home Assistant Dashboard Not Loading. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices.

Hook

You open Home Assistant and the dashboard is blank. Or it shows "The following entities are not available" for every card. Or the UI loads but your carefully crafted Lovelace YAML is not rendering. The dashboard that controls your entire smart home is down.

The Wrong Way

Deleting the ui-lovelace.yaml or the whole lovelace folder from .storage resets your dashboard completely, losing all card arrangements.

# BAD: Deleting the dashboard storage
rm -f /config/.storage/lovelace_data

Dashboard reset to default
All custom cards, views, and arrangements lost

You lose hours of dashboard configuration.

The Right Way

Check resource loading and configuration errors without deleting data.

# 1. Check the browser console
# Open Developer Tools (F12) → Console
# Look for 404 errors or JavaScript errors

Failed to load resource: http://hass.local:8123/local/custom-card.js net::ERR_ABORTED 404

A custom card JavaScript file is missing.

# 2. Check Lovelace configuration
# Web UI → Settings → Dashboards → Three dots → Raw configuration
# Or check the YAML file
cat /config/ui-lovelace.yaml 2>/dev/null || cat /config/lovelace/views.yaml 2>/dev/null

# BAD: Missing resource
resources:
  - url: /local/custom-card.js
    type: module

# 3. Fix: Remove or comment out the missing resource
# Temporarily disable custom resources to test

# 4. Clear browser cache and reload
# Or use incognito mode

# 5. For storage-mode dashboards (managed via UI), check the database:
sqlite3 /config/home-assistant_v2.db "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM lovelace;"

1  # Dashboard exists — not empty

If the dashboard is stored in the database, restart HA:

docker restart hass

Prevention

• Keep custom cards in /config/www/ and reference them as /local/.
• Use the UI dashboard editor instead of manual YAML when possible.
• After adding a custom card, test it in a new view before adding to production dashboards.
• Use resolved_resources in dashboard settings to pin resource versions.
• Back up your Lovelace configuration alongside your regular HA backups.

Advanced Troubleshooting

Check the Logs

Most TOOL errors are logged to stdout or a dedicated log file. Check your logs first:

# Check system logs
journalctl -u tool --since "1 hour ago"

# Or check the application log
tail -50 ~/.tool/logs/error.log

Test with a Minimal Example

Create the simplest possible tool configuration to verify the base setup works:

tool --version
tool --help

If the minimal test passes, add configuration options one at a time until you find the breaking change.

Common Configuration Mistakes

• Using the wrong file path or URL in configuration
• Forgetting to restart TOOL after changing config files
• Mixing tabs and spaces in YAML configuration files
• Setting incorrect permissions on configuration directories

When to Reinstall

If none of the above resolves the issue, consider a clean reinstall:

# Backup your configuration
cp -r ~/.tool ~/.tool.bak

# Remove and reinstall
# Follow the official TOOL installation guide

This ensures you start from a known good state and can isolate the issue.

Common Mistakes with assistant dashboard

1. Forgetting deriving (Show, Eq) on custom data types needed for debugging
2. Placing the wildcard pattern first in case expressions, making all subsequent patterns unreachable
3. Using head and tail instead of pattern matching, causing runtime errors on empty lists

These mistakes appear frequently in real-world HOME code. DodaTech's contributors have identified these patterns through analysis of open-source projects and production systems.

Practice Exercise

Write a pure function that safely divides two integers using Maybe, then test it with edge cases like division by zero and negative numbers.

This exercise reinforces the concepts covered in this guide. Try implementing it before checking online solutions.

FAQ

DodaTech — a dashboard you can always see.