HA running in Docker and mixed up access rights manager versus root

Installation
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1

I’m running HA in a Docker environment which is running on an Intel NUC. The basic stuff is all running fine and I can access HA. Next is to start adding automations, I can save an automation, I see it is in the autmoation.yaml file, but it is not showing up in the GUI.

Then I discovered that HA is giving the automation.yaml file root access rights while the rest of the files has manager as access rights. see directory list.

-rwxrwxrwx  1 root    manager      728 Oct  6 21:56 automations.yaml
drwxrwxrwx  4 manager manager     4096 Sep 18 13:36 blueprints
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager     3037 Oct  6 20:10 configuration.yaml
drwxrwxrwx  3 manager manager     4096 Sep 21 21:53 custom_components
drwxrwxrwx  6 manager manager     4096 Oct  6 21:53 data
drwxrwxrwx  2 manager manager     4096 Sep 18 13:35 deps
drwxrwxrwx  2 manager manager     4096 Sep 28 20:41 extensions
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root    manager    39237 Oct  6 21:56 home-assistant.log
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager 35598336 Oct  6 21:53 home-assistant_v2.db
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager       77 Sep 23 21:35 http.yaml
drwxrwxrwx  3 manager manager     4096 Sep 24 08:25 image
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager        0 Sep 18 13:35 scenes.yaml
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager        0 Sep 18 13:35 scripts.yaml
-rwxrwxrwx  1 manager manager      413 Sep 27 09:39 secrets.yaml
drwxrwxrwx  2 manager manager     4096 Sep 18 13:36 tts
drwxrwxrwx  2 manager manager     4096 Sep 28 20:27 workspace
drwxrwxrwx  3 manager manager     4096 Sep 21 21:55 www

I know and understand HA needs to run in root. Thus there is an issue with access rights. But I cannot find and don’t know how to resolve this. Any suggestions?

2

I don’t think the permissions are your problem here. Everything is rwxrwxrwx, so HA can read and write all of it. automations.yaml is owned by root simply because the container runs as root and rewrote the file when you saved. That’s normal.

If the automation is in the file but not in the UI, it’s usually one of these:

configuration.yaml doesn’t load it. Check it still has

automation: !include automations.yaml

It’s easy to lose that line if you replaced the default config at some point.

Or the file fails to parse. Your home-assistant.log was written at the same time as the automation, so have a look for something like Invalid config for 'automation' in there, or under Settings > System > Logs.

After fixing either, Developer tools > YAML > Automations reload is enough, no restart needed.

3

The symptom – automation saved to automations.yaml but not showing in the UI – almost always means HA read the file at startup but the file was written after startup with different ownership, and the running instance is not watching for external file changes to that file.

In Home Assistant Container (Docker), the process runs as root inside the container, which is why newly written files get root ownership on the host volume. The GUI-saved automations go into automations.yaml and take effect only after a configuration reload or restart, not instantly.

Two things to check:

  1. Reload automations: In HA go to Developer Tools > YAML > Reload Automations. If your saved automation then appears, the file and permissions are fine and you just need to reload after each GUI save (HA normally does this automatically – if it is not, check your container logs for write errors).
  2. Permissions mismatch: If reload fails, the container cannot write back to the host volume. Run ls -la on your config directory and confirm the user running the container can write there. The standard fix is sudo chown -R <your-user>:<your-user> /path/to/config on the host, then restart the container.

Running HA Container as root is normal and expected; the mix of root and manager ownership you see just reflects which files HA wrote vs. which you created manually.