Question 1

What do I need before I start?

Accepted Answer

Two things: a Home Assistant address your browser can reach over a secure (https) connection, and a Long-Lived Access Token from that Home Assistant.

The secure part is the bit that catches people out, so here it is up front. Dashable runs in your browser over HTTPS, and browsers refuse to let an HTTPS page open an insecure connection. That is a browser rule, not a Dashable one — it applies to every web app. If your Home Assistant is only reachable at something like http://192.168.1.10:8123, your browser will block the connection and nothing we do in the app can change that.

There are three ways past it, in order of how much work they are:

1. Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa). You already have a secure remote address. In Home Assistant, go to Settings, then Home Assistant Cloud, and copy your remote URL. Paste it into Dashable. Done.

2. The Dashable panel for Home Assistant. Install Dashable into Home Assistant itself through HACS and your dashboards run inside Home Assistant, over its own connection. No certificates, no ports, no HTTPS setup at all — and it keeps working with no internet. See "Run Dashable inside Home Assistant" further down this page.

3. Put HTTPS in front of Home Assistant yourself. DuckDNS with Let's Encrypt, or a reverse proxy such as Nginx Proxy Manager, Caddy, or Cloudflare Tunnel. This is the most flexible route and the most setup. Home Assistant's own documentation covers each of these.

None of these expose your home to us. Whichever route you take, the connection runs from your browser to your Home Assistant — Dashable's servers are not in the path.

Question 2

How do I get a Long-Lived Access Token?

Accepted Answer

In Home Assistant:

1. Click your user name or avatar at the bottom-left of the sidebar.
2. Open the Security tab.
3. Scroll down to Long-lived access tokens.
4. Click Create token, and give it a name you'll recognise later — "Dashable" works.
5. Copy the token immediately. Home Assistant shows it once and never again.

If you lose it, nothing breaks — just delete that token in Home Assistant and create a new one.

Question 3

How do I connect, step by step?

Accepted Answer

The first time you sign in, Dashable opens a short setup wizard. If you skipped it, or you're adding a second Home Assistant, open Settings and choose Home Assistant — the same wizard is there.

1. Friendly Name. Whatever you want to call this Home Assistant. It defaults to "Home". If you only have one, leave it.

2. Home Assistant URL. Paste the address exactly as you have it — including the https:// part. You do not need to convert it to a websocket address or add anything to the end. Dashable does both for you and shows you the result: a line reading "Will connect to:" appears underneath with the exact address it will use. If you pasted a Home Assistant Cloud address, it will say so.

3. Watch the colour of that box. Green means the address is secure and good to go. Amber means the address will be blocked by your browser for being insecure — go back to the three routes above. Red means the address isn't valid at all, usually a typo.

4. Long-Lived Access Token. Paste the token you created.

5. Click Test Connection. This opens a real connection to your Home Assistant from this browser, right now, and tells you what happened. It is worth the ten seconds — it is the difference between knowing and guessing.

6. Click Save & Connect. Dashable saves the connection and connects. When it lands you'll see a confirmation with the number of entities it found. That number is the proof it worked: those are your devices.

Question 4

Test Connection failed. What does the message mean?

Accepted Answer

There are four failures and each one points somewhere specific.

"Reached Home Assistant, but the token was rejected." The address is right — that's genuinely good news, the hard part works. The token is wrong, expired, or was deleted. Create a fresh Long-Lived Access Token and paste it again.

"Could not connect." Your browser couldn't open a connection at all. Check the address for typos, and check that it is secure. An address that isn't secure fails here.

"Timed out." Nothing answered within ten seconds. Either this device can't reach that address at all — try opening it in a new browser tab and see whether Home Assistant loads — or the address is reachable but its SSL certificate isn't valid. A self-signed certificate will fail here; browsers won't accept one for this kind of connection.

"The connection closed before Home Assistant responded." Usually the same certificate problem as a timeout, just failing faster.

If Home Assistant loads fine in a browser tab but Dashable can't connect, the certificate is the first thing to check.

Question 5

Where does my token end up?

Accepted Answer

Your choice, and it's a real choice.

Keep it in this browser only, and it never leaves this device. The trade-off is that your dashboards don't follow you to another device — you'd set the connection up again there.

Or let Dashable sync it, in which case it is stored encrypted so your dashboards open anywhere you log in. It is never stored in the clear.

Either way, the token is only ever used to open a connection from your browser to your Home Assistant. Your entity states, sensor history, and camera streams go straight between the two. They are never sent to, cached by, or logged on Dashable's servers.

Question 6

I'm running Dashable locally for development. Can I use localhost?

Accepted Answer

Yes — localhost and 127.0.0.1 are accepted, and they're the one case where an insecure address works, because browsers make an exception for local addresses. On a hosted Dashable they won't work.

Question 7

How do I create a dashboard?

Accepted Answer

From the Dashable home page, create a new dashboard and give it a name. Names are just for you — "Living Room Display", "Kitchen Tablet", whatever you'll recognise. You can rename it later.

One thing worth deciding now: if you already know this dashboard is destined for a particular screen — a wall tablet, an old phone, a spare monitor — Dashable can create it at that screen's exact size, so what you design is what you get. Otherwise it scales to whatever it's opened on.

On the free plan you get one dashboard and up to twenty widgets on it. That is enough to build something you'd actually put on a wall, and there's no clock on it — it is a free tier, not a trial.

Question 8

How do I add my first widget?

Accepted Answer

The panel on the left of the editor has three tabs.

Active lists the widgets already on this dashboard — your layer list. Use it to select something you can't easily click, or to hide a widget while you work around it.

Widgets is the palette. This is the one you want.

Saved holds widgets you've built and saved to reuse later.

Open the Widgets tab and you'll find everything grouped into five categories: General, Home Assistant, Charts & Gauges, Time & Weather, and System. Drag any of them onto the canvas, or click to drop it in.

Start with something from Time & Weather — a Digital Clock needs no configuration at all and shows you the canvas working in one move. Then go get something real.

Question 9

How do I point a widget at one of my devices?

Accepted Answer

Select the widget on the canvas and its properties open beside it. Every widget that reads from Home Assistant has a section called Data Source. Open it and pick your entity.

The entity list is your actual Home Assistant — the same entities, the same names. If the list is empty or the widget complains that there's no connection, the Home Assistant connection is the thing to fix first, not the widget.

Below Data Source, the rest of the properties are about how it looks and behaves: colours, icons, sizing, what happens when someone taps it, and conditions that change the widget based on your home's state. Change one and the widget updates as you watch.

Question 10

Where's the Save button?

Accepted Answer

There isn't one. Dashable saves as you work — move a widget, change a colour, and it's stored about half a second later. Close the tab and come back; it's how you left it.

Question 11

How do I get it onto a wall tablet?

Accepted Answer

Open the dashboard in view mode — the same dashboard with the editor stripped away, nothing but your design and live data. That's the URL to leave open on the tablet.

Point the tablet's browser at it, put the browser in full screen, and that's a wall panel.

Question 12

What should my first dashboard actually have on it?

Accepted Answer

If you're not sure where to start, this takes about five minutes and gives you something genuinely useful:

1. A Digital Clock, large, across the top. No setup.
2. A Weather (Current & Forecast) widget underneath it.
3. Two or three Toggle (Power Button) or Light Control widgets for the lights in the room the screen lives in.
4. An Entity Value widget for one number you actually care about — indoor temperature, or today's energy use.

That's four widget types, well inside the free twenty, and it is a better wall display than most people ever get around to building. Everything after that is refinement.

Question 13

What is this, and why would I want it?

Accepted Answer

Dashable can install into Home Assistant itself as a sidebar panel. You design your dashboards in the Dashable editor as usual, then they sync down to your Home Assistant box and open from your Home Assistant sidebar.

Two reasons people do it:

It removes the HTTPS requirement entirely. The panel runs inside Home Assistant and uses Home Assistant's own session, so there's no certificate to set up, no port to open, and no token to paste anywhere.

It keeps working when the internet doesn't. Synced dashboards are stored on your Home Assistant box and survive restarts. With no connection to Dashable at all, they keep running.

You need Home Assistant 2024.6 or newer, and HACS installed.

Question 14

How do I install it?

Accepted Answer

1. In Home Assistant, open HACS, click the three-dot menu, and choose Custom repositories.
2. Add the repository https://github.com/robot-one-software/dashable-ha-panel with the category set to Integration.
3. Find Dashable in the list and click Download.
4. Restart Home Assistant. This step is required.
5. In Dashable on the web, open Settings, then HA Panel (HACS), and generate a sync token. Copy it.
6. Back in Home Assistant, go to Settings, then Devices & Services, then Add Integration, and search for Dashable. Paste the sync token when asked.

Dashable now appears in your Home Assistant sidebar. Open it and your dashboards are there.

There's no YAML to edit and no files to copy. Updates arrive through HACS like any other integration.

Question 15

How do my changes get across?

Accepted Answer

They don't, automatically — you pull them. Edit a dashboard in the Dashable editor, then open the panel in Home Assistant and press Sync. The latest version comes down.

If you have more than one dashboard, the panel has a picker to switch between them.

Question 16

What can't the panel do?

Accepted Answer

Three honest limits.

It's view and control only. You can use your dashboards — tap the lights, watch the cameras — but you can't edit them here. Editing happens in the Dashable web editor.

A few widgets depend on Dashable's cloud and can't work locally. Announcements over text-to-speech, the cloud image proxy, and weather locations all fall into this group. Rather than failing quietly, they show a small "unavailable" tile so you can see exactly which ones they are.

Your dashboards are stored sealed on the Home Assistant box — compressed and tagged rather than left as editable files. That's deliberate: editing belongs in the editor, where the app can keep the design valid.

Question 17

Something's wrong. Where do I look first?

Accepted Answer

"Sync token was rejected." Generate a fresh token in Dashable under Settings, then HA Panel (HACS), then reconfigure the integration in Home Assistant with the new one.

The panel is blank after an update. The integration versions its own files so this should fix itself, but a browser can hold onto an old copy. Hard-refresh the Home Assistant tab once.

Dashable isn't in the sidebar after installing. The restart in step 4 is the usual culprit. Restart Home Assistant and look again.

Dashable documentation

Connect your Home Assistant

Build your first dashboard

Run Dashable inside Home Assistant

The widget library

Keep reading

How Dashable works

Setting things up

Ready to build one?