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

# …

@lrosselld use .storage/* to ignore all files inside .storage and then whitelist .storage/lovelace. Here is updated list:

# 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/*

!.storage/lovelace

@spcheema unfortunately this did not resolve my problem. After adding the lines you suggested, it updated the .gitignore file backup but lovelace is still not uploading.

Here is my current .gitignore and my last commit/change.