Daily backup Home Assistant configuration into a git repository

.gitignore

# You can whitelist files/folders with !, those will not be ignored.
# Everything that starts with a / are for root elements

# ignore
/custom_components/
/zigbee2mqtt/log
/zigbee2mqtt/state.json
/home-assistant_v2.* # Exclude Home Assistant history-related database. Make sure to enable git LFS if you don't exclude that, since those files can go easily over 100MB
/home-assistant.log*
/.ssh/
.storage

# keep
!.gitignore
!.HA_VERSION

README.md

Daily backup Home Assistant with git

As always, please CONSTANTLY read and UNDERSTAND what you copy and run on the Internet. Stay safe!

• mkdir a .ssh dir to the root of the config folder (should be /root/homeassistant)
• ssh-keygen to that directory. I've used ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]". I will not cover the usage of a passphrase here.
• Copy /root/homeassistant/.ssh/id_rsa.pub content to your Settings ➜ Deploy keys page of your Github repo
• Because the shell command won't (obviously) have access to all of the HA instance, cd to your ha configuration directory and run that command to target the newly generated id_rsa file:

git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i /config/.ssh/id_rsa -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking=no' -F /dev/null"

• Copy backup.sh to the HA configuration folder
• Create a .gitignore file into the HA configuration folder and add the needed exceptions (I've provided mine)
• Copy the automation content (automation.yaml), create a new automation and paste the content. You can also go to the automations.yaml and write it here if you're more comfortable. I've set the automation to automatically run at 2:00 am everday. Feel free to change it as you like. Also I like to be notified on the app, using the native notify service.

automation.yaml

# I've included the notify service to let you know when the backup is successful or not. 
# In the long term I felt like having the successful notification wasn't needed so I removed it. 
# Feel free to tweak that, and why not share what you did :)

alias: Daily Backup
description: "Backup Home Assistant configuration folder"
trigger:
  - platform: time
    at: "02:00:00"
condition: []
action:
  - service: shell_command.backup
    data: {}
    response_variable: backup_response
  - if:
      - condition: template
        value_template: "{{ backup_response['returncode'] == 0 }}"
    then:
      - service: notify.notify
        data:
          title: ✅ Backup successful
          message: "{{ backup_response['stdout'] }}"
    else:
      - service: notify.notify
        data:
          title: ❌ Backup failed
          message: "{{ backup_response['stderr'] }}"
mode: single

backup.sh

#!/bin/sh

# To run before
# git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i /config/.ssh/id_rsa -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking=no' -F /dev/null"

HA_VERSION=`cat .HA_VERSION`
COMMIT_CURRENT_DATE=$(date +'%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S')
COMMIT_MESSAGE="[$HA_VERSION]: $COMMIT_CURRENT_DATE"

echo "$COMMIT_MESSAGE"

git add .
git commit -m "$COMMIT_MESSAGE"
git push

configuration.yaml

# add the following into your configuration.yaml file

# …

shell_command:
  backup: bash /config/backup.sh

# …

Service shell_command.backup not found

backup.sh is copied to /root/coonfig which redirect to /homeassistant. I've missed something ?

@vasilvestre You didn't, I did miss something!

You need to add the shell_command integration into your configuration.yaml, like such:

shell_command:
  backup: bash /config/backup.sh

I've updated the gist, thanks!

@vasilvestre You didn't, I did miss something!

You need to add the shell_command integration into your configuration.yaml, like such:

shell_command:
  backup: bash /config/backup.sh

I've updated the gist, thanks!

Alright ! I found the solution myself but got an issue, the shell_command.backup service was not found despite the reload of my whole configuration. I had to restart home assistant.

I will wait to see if the automation runs great !

Public or private repository ?

I wonder if any secrets could get exposed or if I'm safe making the repo public ?

Other configuration outside /config

What about the directory at /root/addon_configs, /root/addons ?
My exemple is sponsorblockcast at /root/addon_configs/db21ed8f_sponsorblockcast/config.yaml

Home assistant v2 db being big

The file home-assistant_v2.db is at 46MB. Should I enable LFS right now ? Should I ignore the .db file ?

Thank you for your gist, really easy to configure everything.
Maybe you also forgot to use git init and git add remote to your steps :)

@vasilvestre I recommend you to commit the backups into a private repository, as even if you ignore things, some updates or new integrations may lead to exposing secrets, and you obviously don't want that. I often change my configuration, try new integrations and stuff, and I don't want to worry about that. It will be a peace of mind if you put everything into a private repository.

About the configurations that is outside the /config folder I'm not really sure how to handle that, since I don't have anything interesting located outside that folder. I may have other ideas to make the backup easier to configure and to save (everything, this time), which would involve Github release instead of committing, with the same idea of hass-auto-backup. In the meantime, feel free to improve my researches :)

I've ignored the .db file since it's only historical data, mine is 404MB currently because of the recent devices I've added I guess, thus resulting into a failing commit because I didn't enabled LFS.
Actually here's my current .gitignore file:

/custom_components/
/zigbee2mqtt/log
/zigbee2mqtt/state.json
/home-assistant_v2.*
/home-assistant.log*
.ssh/
.storage

For some reason /home-assistant_v2.* isn't matching my files. I had to change content to this :

# ignore
/custom_components/
/zigbee2mqtt/log
/zigbee2mqtt/state.json
/home-assistant_v2.db
/home-assistant_v2.db-shm
/home-assistant_v2.db-wal
/home-assistant.log*
/.ssh/
.storage

I have this issue with the automation only, "Identify file /config/.ssh/id_rsa not accessible : no such file or directory."
Is this due to the permissions ?

I am trying to add the .storage/lovelace file to save my Dashboard config. However, any way that I add the .storage folder to .gitignore it will not add to github.

Any advice?