Tag: hass.io

Congratulations on making it this far!

You now have an installation of Hass.io running on your Raspberry Pi. This is the crucial point where you want to begin treating your installation with more care and professionalism.

There is a phrase in the DevOps world that applies here. “Treat your servers like cattle, not pets”. This means that you want your server (i.e. Raspberry Pi) to be homogeneous and easily replaceable (like cattle). You don’t want your server to be hand-built and hand-maintained (like pets).

This means that you should be able to throw away your server (i.e. flash it with a clean install) and use Infrastructure as Code (IaS) to configure it.

In the cloud development world, we would provision everything, including the server itself with code. In our installation, we have an actual piece of hardware (i.e. Raspberry Pi) and so we can’t do a complete IaS implementation.

However, we can version control our Hass.io configuration. Hass.io runs on a series of YAML files. These are simple JSON documents that declarative describe what they system should do. Hass.io determines how to do it based upon what is in the YAML files.

Hass.io does have a built-in way to “backup” your configuration; snapshots. On the Hass.io page, under the “SNAPSHOTS” tab, there is a button to take a snapshot. The downside of this is that it is still stored locally. You would have to then setup a system to copy this snapshot somewhere else. Therefore, I do not recommend this as the primary way you back up your configuration.

The best way, in my humble opinion, is to use Git & Github to back up your configuration files. Git is the de-facto standard for source control management and Github is a free, online repository for backing up, contributing and sharing out source code with the world.

Note that this is a rehash of the excellent instructions on the Home Assistant website.

Be warned, however, Git is not a simple system to learn and there are a huge number of options. However, since you will be doing very little multi-user editing of the configuration files, you are unlikely to run into the big issues with understanding git’s branching, merging, rebasing, etc. tools. A few simple commands should be sufficient to effectively use Git.

Setting up Github

First, we need to set up a Github account so we can store our configuration files. Navigate to the Github signup page and create an account.

Once you have an account, click on the New Repository button to create a new repo to store your configuration files.

Give it a meaningful name (example: homeassistant-config). The standard naming convention for Git repos is all lowercase letters separated by a dash. This is not required, but will make typing it easier.

Choose Public or Private. This is really up to you. If you want to make it easier to share your configuration with others, you can make it Public. If you don’t want to do this, you can make it Private.

Warning!!! Because you will be uploading your configuration to a “public” site, you must be careful not to expose secrets. We will go into this later, but setting the repo to “Private” is not enough to protect your secrets (passwords, IP addresses, etc.). Hass.io has built-in ways to deal with these.

Do not check the “Initialize this repository with a README” checkbox. Since we will already have a repo set up on our local machine, we want to upload it to a clean Github repo.

Do not add a .gitignore or license file yet. We want a clean, empty repo to start with and we will have a custom .gitignore file anyway.

Initialize the Git repo

Now that we can login to our Raspberry Pi and see our configuration files, we need to upload them to Git.

• Launch PuTTY and connect to your Raspberry Pi (if you need a refresher, please see my previous blog post).
• Now we are in the directory where the Hass.io configuration files are located inside the Docker image (if you are in the “home” directory for the Raspberry Pi, either see my previous blog post).
• Make sure git is already installed (or install if needed)

which git
/usr/bin/git       <-- already installed
                   <-- not installed (will not return anything)
sudo apt-get update         <-- update your packages
sudo apt-get install git    <-- install git if needed

You will now need to create a .gitignore file. This is the most important file, both to prevent publishing important/sensitive data (IP addresses, passwords, etc) and to reduce what you upload to Github to a minimum.

whoami         <-- which user are you logged in as
root
pwd
/config         <-- make sure you are in this directory
vim .gitignore

Here is a copy of the excellent .gitignore file from the Home Assistant website. Feel free to customize as needed.

# Example .gitignore file for your config dir.
# A * ensures that everything will be ignored.
*
# You can whitelist files/folders with !, these will not be ignored.
!*.yaml
!.gitignore
!*.md
# Ignore folders.
.storage
.cloud
.google.token
# Ensure these YAML files are ignored, otherwise your secret data/credentials will leak.
ip_bans.yaml
secrets.yaml
known_devices.yaml

Now we need to “initialize” your git repository. This means we are going to tell git that this directory and all of its contents should be tracked as version controlled files (excluding the files/directories mentioned in the .gitignore file, of course)

git init       <-- initialize as a version controlled directory
git status     <-- see what files have been modified
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   configuration.yaml
        modified:   groups.yaml
        modified:   scene.yaml
        modified:   sensor.yaml
        modified:   switch.yaml

You are now seeing a listing of all the files and directories that git sees that have not been committed yet (your list will be different depending on what was set up in the directory).

We need to set some configuration options so git knows how to annotate our changes

git config user.email "dwight.k.schrute@dunder-mifflin.com" 
git config user.name "dwight"   

We need to “add” all the files and directories to the changeset so git saves their current state.

git add *

Now commit your changes so git will save them.

git commit -m "Initial checkin"

Excellent, now you have an initial git repo with a known setup that you can always refer to (or revert to if you break something).

Generate SSH key to connect between Raspberry Pi and Github

Now we need to “push” our changes to a central server to back them up. Git is a distributed version control system. This means it tracks and saves changes locally, but does not “upload” them somewhere else unless you tell it to. This was originally designed to allow lots of people to work independently (even when disconnected) and make it easy to upload and share code when network connectivity was restored.

The most secure way to connect to Github is via SSH key. Here is the link to the help documents on the Github site. We need to generate an SSH key locally, store it in the SSH agent on the Raspberry Pi and then upload it to Github.

Note: we have to generate and store the SSH key in the /config directory inside the Docker container. If it is stored anywhere else (like the default location, ~/.ssh/id_rsa, it will get deleted the next time the container is restarted.

• Make sure you are in the /config directory

pwd
/config

• Make a new directory to store the key, generate the ssh key and save it to disk. Save the file to .ssh/id_rsa. Enter a passphrase if you want to (you will be required to enter it each time unless you also set up ssh-agent, I’m not doing this as I feel it is overkill at this time).

mkdir .ssh       <- create a new "hidden" directory to store the key in
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "dwight.k.schrute@dunder-mifflin.com"
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/root/.ssh/id_rsa): .ssh/id_rsa
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in .ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in .ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Now we need to upload the SSH key to Github so we can use it to authenticate our git repo pushes.You need to copy the public key from your local Raspberry Pi to Github (actual key redacted). If you are using Putty, you can just highlight the text starting with ssh-rsa and ending with your email address and it will be copied to the clipboard.

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-rsa .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................== dwight.k.schrute@dunder-mifflin.com

• In your Github.com account you created earlier, click on your profile picture in the upper-right hand corner and select Settings.
• Select SSH and GPG keys
• Click on New SSH key
• Enter a Title: Home Assistant (or whatever will remind you what this key is used for)
• Enter the Key: ssh-rsa…
• Click Add SSH key
• Enter your Github.com password to confirm

Push from Raspberry Pi to Github

Now you can “push” your configuration files from your Docker container to Github so they are backed up.

• Navigate to your Github repo (click on the left-hand icon and select the repo you created earlier)
• Click on the Clone or download button
• Click on the Use SSH hyperlink in the right-hand corner if it is not already selected (the title of the dialog should say ‘Clone with SSH’)
• Copy the url (git@github.com:username/repoName.git)
• Set the remote repo where git will push your changes

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:dw/homeassistant-config.git

• If you try to push now, you will get a permission denied error (-u says to use a new upstream repo for this branch, origin is the name of this upstream repo in git, master is the branch we are on). This is because you have stored your SSH key in a non-standard location. We need to tell git where to find the SSH key.

git push -u origin master
git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

• Git allows you to store configuration files locally, inside the repo itself. This is especially useful for our Docker container since we don’t want these changes to be lost when the container restarts. We need to tell Git where to find our SSH file

git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i /usr/share/hassio/homeassistant/.ssh/id_rsa -F /dev/null"
git push -u origin master           <-- push your changes to Github.com
Enumerating objects: 19, done.
Counting objects: 100% (18/18), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (11/11), done.
Writing objects: 100% (12/12), 1.26 KiB | 143.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 12 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (8/8), completed with 5 local objects.
To github.com:dw/homeassistant-config.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'master' from 'origin'.

Hurray! You have successfully uploaded your initial configuration to Github!