[gregmac]

One of my unconventional uses is to sync my HomeAssistant configuration to my desktop, where I have it in a git repository. I can edit manually from my desktop, and/or manage from the HomeAssistant UI, and either way, commit discrete, working changes to git once I'm ready.

[tailspin2019]

Interesting.

I’ve gone through so many iterations of trying to work out how to do something like this for Home Assistant config.

Do you set it up as realtime 2-way sync? And do you just exclude the .git folder from the sync to HA?

[gregmac]

Yes exactly that, plus it ignores .log, .db and core.restore_state.

I should note I specifically use this for doing source control of configuration and making it easy to manually edit -- I have an entirely separate process for backups of the server itself.

Like you, I've also gone through several iterations but this has been working for me for almost a year now.

[tailspin2019]

Cool, thanks for elaborating. I may give this approach another try.

That said, I’m making far fewer YAML changes these days than I used to. I’m doing almost everything via their UI so maybe I need to consider how much I actually need source control now vs just having solid backups.

Originally I was against their move from YAML config to the more user friendly GUI approach but I have to admit it’s a lot easier to make quick on-the-fly changes to my automations these days. I’m begrudgingly coming around to the idea of not firing up VS Code every time I want to tweak something!

[torarnv]

This. I'd like to sync my ~/development directory, including all the git directories, so I don't need to push and pull branches between machines. Is this at all feasible?

[frosted-flakes]

It works fine. I've been doing it for ages with no problems. Note that I added node_modules, etc. to the ignore file so that it's not always syncing thousands of tiny files, which always tend to take a long time for some reason.

[tailspin2019]

Out of interest, what OS are you using? I'm wondering if some of the issues I've had in the past may have been macOS specific.

That said, I can't recall if I tried excluding node_modules when I last gave this a go. Maybe I'll try it again.

[tailspin2019]

Yeah been trying to work that one out for years.

I've read of other HN'ers doing this successfully (syncing git repos between machines) but I just seem to get a lot of issues - git repos often broken temporarily, conflicts etc.

[torarnv]

Don't know how Syncthing works, of it it would even work, but what if Syncthing would detect that it recurses into a .git folder, and then use git push to push all refs to the remote .git repo? That should give a transparent "sync" of the entire git repo and workdir for the user, but via the safety of git's own sync mechanism.