Home Assistant Test Environment

For those that have a test environment setup for HA, how do you set this up? With all the recent changes, I’d like to be able to work on a test environment while leaving my current HA in place. I run HA on virtual box, so I assume I could clone the VM and run a separate instance, but not sure what will happen if try to run them both at the same time??

Just run your HA in a docker environment, then you can switch between the versions in seconds.

When running your second instance change the port it’s running on to something like 8124 via the http config

My test VM contains everything it needs to run so that it is as isolated as possible - HomeAssistant, Appdaemon, Mosquitto broker, influxdb database, grafana, - and I also created a separate telegram bot.

In cases where the configuration is different between the VM and the working copy (running on a Pi), I use secrets to keep different configs, and then git to transfer the config between them.

If your working copy is also a VM on the same machine, I would imagine you have a bridged network adapter allow communication with other devices on your local network. If that is the case, then you will need to do something different on the test VM to avoid IP port clashes. You could use a NAT network adapter, and simulate devices from your network, but this depends on the type of devices that you have.

Thanks all. I was able to clone my VM in virtual box and give it a different MAC address which resulted in a new IP for the clone. I can run both simultaneously. Works great!

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