Home Assistant gets updated quite a lot, and that is fantastic! It has come to a point where the system is rock solid and very stable in my experience. Due to this, my HA instance often just minds its own business, and i do not need to update it really.
While monthly releases is great, it also has a drawback. I dont know if its even required, but i feel like i need to update each month at least once to make sure i get a smooth update. Like, chances for issues are higher if i update from 2024.1 to 2025.9 instead of 2025.8 to 2025.9. And because HA is so stable at this point, i would actually not really want to bother with this, unless i have issues.
Due to this, i was wondering if there has been talks about some sort of LTS version, that maybe only gets updated yearly or even less? Or would this be too much to maintain?
It has been suggested many times, but the way HA works makes it impossible.
HA is not independent. It is interconnected with a lot of third party vendors and developers, which is not under the HA dev team’s control.
HA runs with a 6 month grace period for internal deprecations (external ones is out of HA’s control and can be way less or even instant), so updating each 5 months should be somewhat easy.
You will still need to read the release notes for all the updates up to the point, but failures due to deprecations should be low and mostly related to warnings of coming ones.
Like Wally describes, is true. It mostly helps to explain with sample.
IF any of your intregrations have to deal with changes from the vendor which would break the version you have, there is only way to:
upgrade HA to version where it is adapted and fixed
create a fork on your own and backport changes to your version.
and since backporting is depending on how the issue is fixed in the first place, you might end up with more work.
So would not want to advice to wait for issues to happen, as like you describe too, upgrading in big steps is also challenging sometimes.
An advice I would give , try to keep up with (bi)montly latest version (eg anyting that doesnt end on .0). Sometime a release has small issues which are resolved in .1 or .2.
So when the new month .0 shows up, just upgrade to the previous month >.0.
I run the dockerized version of HA to mitigate this concern.
Specifically in this mode, the HA installation is just:
The Docker image.
A config directory.
As such I can download each months docker image and independently choose if and when I want to switch to that image (or rollback to an older image, assuming I keep it locally).
As long as I have a good backup of the config directory, I feel (reasonably **) confident that if I was to upgrade and later discover an issue, I could roll back to my previous state.
** - A significant chunk of the config directory is just flat files, so most of my confidence comes from proficiency with unix filesystem diff tools. The binary files (home-assistant_v2.db and zigbee.db) are a little concerning as I don’t (currently) have a good way to fix them (should an issue occur), however since they are SQLite databases, I could probably open that can of worms if I needed to.
