Hi everyone,
A few days ago I posted ha-state-archive, an infrastructure-side archival and audit pipeline for Home Assistant snapshots.
While building and using that archive corpus, I ended up developing a second companion project focused on historical exploration and search:
ha-archive-search
Repository:
What it does
ha-archive-search is a multi-platform search engine operating on archived Home Assistant versions stored outside HA itself.
The project currently provides:
- bounded recursive filesystem search;
- version-aware traversal (
--latest,--version,--all-versions); - compact or context search modes;
- documentation filtering;
- Markdown export;
- lightweight Flask web interface;
- Docker deployment;
- LAN/VPN browser access from desktop or mobile devices.
The search corpus is the archive structure produced by ha-state-archive, but the project itself is filesystem-oriented and does not depend on Home Assistant internals at runtime.
Why I built it
Once you accumulate months or years of Home Assistant snapshots, searching historical configurations manually becomes painful.
I wanted something able to answer questions like:
- “When did this entity first appear?”
- “Which version introduced this automation?”
- “What changed between these periods?”
- “Where was this helper referenced historically?”
The Markdown export is especially useful for:
- incident investigation;
- historical analysis;
- sharing findings;
- external tooling and LLM workflows.
Philosophy
The project follows the same philosophy as ha-state-archive:
- Home Assistant → real-time automation and operational decisions
- External infrastructure → archival, audit, search and historical analysis
The goal is not to replace Home Assistant functionality, but to complement it with long-term infrastructure tooling.
Feedback welcome — especially from people running large or long-lived Home Assistant installations.