Daily backup Home Assistant configuration into a git repository

.gitignore

# You can whitelist files/folders with !, those will not be ignored.

# ignore
custom_components/
zigbee2mqtt/log
zigbee2mqtt/state.json
home-assistant.log
home-assistant.log.1
home-assistant.log.fault
.ssh/ # Don't be stupid and ignore that folder
.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 "ha@home.local". 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

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