Home Assistant With Version Control
Overview
Home Assistant works half in system (e.g. UI integrations) and half in YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML). YAML files are usually stored as .yml or .yaml (Home Assistant works best with the latter). More and more features are available in front end but one thing I miss is version control. Version control main benefit is the ability to go back to a prior (hopefully working) version if I mess anything up without having to do a full snapshot (backup) restore of the whole system.
Other benefits are comparing different versions if an automation doesn’t work quite as intended.
Pre-Requisites
Understanding of version control and more specifically git is required.
Follow these instructions to get git setup. This should be a minimum to get files managed in a modern version control.
Sharing your configuration on GitHub
The steps you need to complete depends on your tools (below). The minimum would be Step 5.
Additional Tools
I’d recommend Visual Studio Code (VSCode) add-on. It natively supports Git and has built in syntax highlighting, checking and formatting for YAML files.
VSCode also gives a visual way to manage your code repository as well without having to use the script on step 6 in Sharing your configuration on GitHub.
And a list of changes which you can see the changes before the change or compare it to your current file.
Summary
Once it’s setup, the power of version control comes into play. From historical log of changes to branching.
My configuration can be found here.
