I would like to have a “maintenance-free” or rather, a “self-maintaining” Home Assistant system, so it is not depend on me to keep it up to date. I was just wondering if there are more people who are pursuing this or if there are already topics that can support this?
Example: I have smart plugs from athom on ESP-home basis, which I always have to confirm ESP-Home update manually.
And, I have smart plugs based on Tuya. They always work, and I never have to update them.
I prefer the ESP-home plugs because they operate locally, but I think the Tuya plugs work better because I never have to update them myself and they are very reliable and actually always work. With the Athom plugs on an ESP-home basis, I regularly have a problem (off instead of on) after performing an update.
In this topic I would like to share knowledge to strive for a maintenance-free Home Assistant set-up. Please provide your input.
In order not to create too big a difference between the version my equipment is running on and the latest versions, I thought it would be good practice to stay “up to date”.
So you mean to say you ESP home device doesn’t work if you don’t update them ??
Depends…most of the time ESP updates are regarding a new device or new functionality.
It is doubtful you are actually using that specific new device or function…
Ofc it is another thing if it is a security update…but can’t remember the last time I saw one for ESPhome
Suppose you would always like to have everything* “up to date”, or for example, 1 or 2 versions behind the latest version. Can this be automated? For example, automatically implement updates every first of the month at 2:00 AM.
(*Home Assistant, the core, ESP-Home, and other plugins)
Before thinking about automatic update go look back two weeks ago and find posts on Node Red or Appdaemon
Im a firm believer updates are a good thing. But when there’s a decent chance breaking changes are a thing AUTOMATIC updates are a bad idea.
Microsoft and your phone’s operating system publishers spend a TON of time testing thier releases with tons of configurations to be relatively sure that they don’t inflict a bad update on the general public. (they also have large paid staff responsible for same.) and they sometimes get it wrong (before someone starts going ham on anyones updates mechanism for being awful - just undersand exactly how hard it is to send millions of copies of anything to anyone with a sub 0.1% failure rate)
HA in contrast does everything open source in essentially what is server class software and while Nabu Casa brings staff to the party. Checking updates for deployment is SQUARELY the responsibility of the end user. It’s the reason there’s an extensive breaking changes section in every release that you should read and understand before EVER touching that install button.
Meaning it’s unreasonable to expect HA to test everything to the extent required to be acceptable for fire and forget updates for everything.
Now I’m NOT saying don’t update. IT/OT and operational security demands some updates are taken.
While I was building my system I took updates every month but that’s not what I want to be doing long term so Instead I’m now working towards a quarterly deployment cadence on my main production install.
Once I’m pretty stabile I’ll work towards bi-annual. But I probably not going to wait much longer than that to keep from having to have a heavy lift on update day.
I wouldn’t recommend auto updating anything. If you are trying to keep a maintenance free HA system, which of the following is more likely to require human intervention:
A system that’s been working for months, but never been upgraded. (If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Risk here is that there’s some fixed security issue that doesn’t get patched, or some long-standing bug that’s fixed.)
A system that is constantly compiling new firmware and automatically changing it on the devices. (This will fix any newly discovered security issues or bugs automatically, but also risks failures that require human intervention.)
The risks for #1 are nearly zero if all your devices are isolated on their own wifi AP or VLAN (and have no internet access.) You can still upgrade them manually if you choose, but everything will likely run fine if you ignore them for years.
The risks for #2 are probably also low, but not as low as #1. All kinds of things can go wrong with recompiling and uploading firmware. Most are trivial things that are easily fixed - but won’t happen automatically.
Sorry this just isn’t how Home Assistant works right now.
You need to set aside 10 to 15 minutes each month to deal with updates. Doing this at the end of a release cycle (last Wednesday of the month) will ensure you get all the minor updates at once.
