It can’t always be bad news, right? I’m pleased to report that I successfully upgraded my production system from 0.80.0 to 0.89.1.
The success was mostly due to taking note of all breaking changes and major enhancements made, over the last nine releases, and adapting my configuration accordingly. The two changes that affected me most were the adoption of the Lovelace UI and, because I use two custom components, the “Great Migration”.
All experiments were carried out on my test system (an old laptop running Ubuntu and Home Assistant with docker-compose). After I had the Lovelace UI adjusted to my liking (I’m using ui-lovelace.yaml) I turned to the needs of adapting my two custom MQTT components (climate.py and alarm_control_panel.py. Once they were squared away, I did a general cleanup of my YAML configuration files.
My production system is simply an old 32-bit netbook running Lubuntu and Home Assistant in a python ‘virtualenv’. I stopped Home Assistant, then copied all config files and custom components from my test system (with a few minor edits to reflect it was now running on the production system).
I proceeded with the standard upgrade procedure for ‘virtualenv’. Upon completion I rebooted the production system. It restarted perfectly and upon logging in it greeted me with my new Lovelace UI showing the status of all connected devices. A quick test proved all the UI controls were nominal. The HomeKit component also worked without any fuss.
Many thanks to all of Home Assistant’s developers, and supporters, for their dedication and hard work.