Hi everyone, new in the community. One question: if other person has a house with the exact same devices as me. Is it possible to “clone” my HA so that they can have exactly same addons, automatizations…everything same as mine, and then change their owner/user/password to login? or is necessary to do everything from the beginning manually…(I hope no…). Thanks in advance.
Not that simple. Your friend may use similar devices and services but they are in no way ‘identical’
Each cloud automation has its own credentials and logins. So they need to be torn down and reset.
Each device will need to authorize to its integration. (you want it this way else bad guys could take over your devices)
You will constantly be finding stuff that didn’t get ‘reset’ correctly and it will be a credentialing nightmare. Don’t do it.
Whether or not you can find a way to ‘duplicate’ or ‘clone’ an install it’s not designed to work that away and will end in pain.
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Thank you, Sorry for the delay.I did not realize your reply.
I see your point but if I want to try, It is possible to change owner, user and password in home assistant once installed or not?
Not really sure there’s a way to change the owner account tbh. Can definitely add new users or change the password of the existing users.
Your easiest way to do this is just to make a backup and then give your friend the backup. They can restore it and have your setup.
But I have to tell you there’s very little chance this will work. When a device is first added to HA a unique identifier is generated for it. This is tied to the that particular physical device. Its not the make and model, its more like the serial number. Even if your friend has the exact same make and model devices as you, they definitely do not have the same serial number since that’s impossible.
You might be able to trick some of the integrations with wifi devices by having a different physical device with the same make and model at the same LAN IP. Then its possible HA wouldn’t check again and realize it was talking to a different device now. Depends on how the integration works. But still that means your friend needs to not only have the same devices but have the exact same address reservations as you in their router. This obviously isn’t included in backups and isn’t on the HA device at all, you’d have to basically manually move your router config over to theirs step by step.
This trick also only possibly works with local LAN devices. You can’t trick Zigbee or Zwave, you’ll have to set up those integrations from scratch. You might be able to trick a cloud service in a similar way but it really depends on the service.
I’d say a better approach here is this:
- Help your friend through the setup process. Don’t try and move that part of your config over, just help them add the right integrations and enter the right credentials and stuff. Then let HA set up all the devices
- Give them your automations, scripts, scenes and dashboards by sharing the YAML and helping them import it. This is where most of the work is after all.
- Help them make helpers and change entity IDs around as necessary to fit the config you moved over.
You’re obviously welcome to try spinning up a clone for them. But if it fails, this is the approach I would fall back on.
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You can change it through the .storage files. I did it on my dev once… I can’t remember why, but it worked.
Thanks a lot . We have only Lan devices, but, as you say I have realized that in my automations mac address is relevant, not only IP, so It will not work. Thank you for your aproach advice!
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