I’m about 2 years old, maybe 3 with HA. Presently running HAOSS on an RPI4, OneDrive backup, integrated with Smarthings, Reolink, Konnected and a slew of other integrations and some custom ESP32 stuff. Still NooB IMO though.
I’m curious how folks are managing and handling updates to integrations, cards and HA?
Are there some you skip?
Are you updating weekly? Daily?
Thanks.
My routine is whenever an update shows in the list (or I notice there are some updates) I read the breaking changes and update if there are no breaking changes that will affect me or if breaking changes will affect me I wait till I have more time. Never had an issue with this in the 5 plus years I have been running HA.
You do NOT have to install every release but you’re highly encouraged to stay relatively current as large skips have caused some folks a lot of pain… But it can be done.
If it’s a security fix… Figure out a way to take it ASAP
I am not a Beta participant because I simply do t have time for what it takes to live dangerously.
My Plan:
Skip 3 months at a time.
Actual:
Oooooh shiny!
Frustratedly skip the.x.0 release every month because I want the new but I also want to see what breaks first.
Review the fixes in x.1, x.2
Apply one of those if they seem to kit impact my stuff (few/no breaking changes - I still refuse to call it backwards incompatiwhatever) or the issues I saw that would impact my install have been resolved
All the built-in cards and integrations get updated along with HA so there’s no actual independent control there.
I used to wait on custom integrations for a few days or a week but now that the updates are more in my face from the little notification indicator I usually update when there is an update for those. If it breaks I can always roll back right away to the previous version.
as far as HA updates I usually wait until a day or two before the next monthly release. So I updated to 2024.11.3 on the tuesday before the first wednesday of december. That way I can be more confident that things won’t break for me and I’m only ever one month behind.
I update Home Assistant near the last day of every month. That keeps me mostly current, but it also gave everyone else a month to find and resolve most of the issues from the .0 release at the beginning of the month.
I tend to update HACS stuff and the integrations whenever they come out (after checking the changelog). I am running on an HA Yellow, and I tend to upgrade the OS on that whenever an update comes out.