I currently have a old way of configuration of home assistant.
Back in the day you had to configure stuff like automations in yaml.
So what i did way back in 2020 i splitted the automations up in different files. you do this by putting this in your configuration.yaml
automation: !include_dir_merge_list automation/
To keep track of the changes you created a git repository around your config folder. and every time you change something you create a commit. and if you find out that you had brake something you could look back and and you could see the changes easily. and fix the bug.
but now a lot has changed now you can make automations easily from the web interface. and you can label, tag automations.
but sinds my automations are not in the automations.yaml i can not change or create than. but since i have over 165 automations, this will be a big file over 5000 lines. and git can not find the correct differences. (because of the syntax everything looks the same for git diff)
but changes from the UI is way to convenient. Do i have to create one big file to edit the automations from the UI?
I am talking about automations right now, but this is also the case for helpers, groups, scripts, template (sensors).
I know that there are ways to backup your system, but a backup of my system is 3GB so that is way to big for a small change in the yaml. plus you can not easily find the changes between the (yaml) automations configuration changes. i create backups but not for this reason.
How do you keep track of your configuration changes?
I have been thinking about this and doing some research. The automations configuration you can get from the web (socket) api interface. So i create a script that extract all the automations from the web interface and split than in file (by tags or labels). and create a git commit from this. This looks doable but i don’t really have a lot of time to make a script/addon for this. and the second problem is how do i do this with other stuff like helpers.
So my summary questions:
- Do i have to create one big file to edit the automations from the UI?
- How do you keep track of your configuration changes?
- Did someone already created a UI configurations extracter?
( i was searching but i do not know the correct keywords) - Is a feature like this already in the make for the next version of home assistant?
That’s not to say the new changes are bad, but the old way of yaml files has its advantages too?