Lay the foundation for automation version history

[nielsrowinbik]

Problem statement

Users building complex automations have no way to roll back to a previous working version after a breaking change. The community has addressed this with third-party solutions, indicating a clear need. This should, however, be something Home Assistant offers natively. Versioning requires foundational changes to how automations are stored and tracked. This opportunity focuses purely on establishing that foundation, enabling a user-facing versioning experience to be built on top in a future cycle.

Scope & Boundaries

In scope

• Design and implementation of a storage and change-tracking mechanism for automations (and potentially scripts)
• Foundation sufficient for a future versioning UI to build on

Not in scope

• User-facing version history UI or rollback interface (this will be a separate opportunity)
• Versioning of config areas beyond automations and scripts

Foreseen solution

A backend mechanism that snapshots automation config on each save, with metadata (timestamp, label) sufficient to support diffing and restoration. The exact storage approach is an open question to resolve early in the cycle.

Community signals

• Community-built automation versioning integrations, like HomeAssistantTimeMachine, are getting traction

Risks & open questions

No response

Appetite

Medium — ~1 cycle. Deliberately scoped to the technical layer only.

Execution issues

No response

Decision log

Date	Decision	Outcome

[nielsrowinbik]

Having talked to JLo about this the other day, we should absolutely expand this initiative to actually implement versioning. It makes it bigger in scope, yes, but just doing the technical foundational work does not provide enough value. There will be users who are impacted by this change (because their current YAML-editing workflow might break), and so we need to offer something "in return".