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

# …