in today's video i'm going to be quickly showing you how to access and join the home assistant beta
now this will work for whatever the current release is as well as any other future release
check it out if it's software he knows it if it's techie he'll show it if it's something fancy or
something janky it's mark watt tech he can automate it and try not to break in its mark watt tech
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well if you're watching this video i'm going to be
assuming that you're interested in checking out and joining the beta so whether that's
just to test a new feature or a particular new integration or maybe you're just one of those
awesome community people that want a head start and just checking out and testing things to make
sure everything runs smoothly for the new release whatever your reason is this video will have you
covered but before we get on to joining the beta there's a couple of things i just want
to point out just to highlight what the beta is and what it isn't so to start with it is a beta
meaning it's an early release so you should expect some bugs and also some changes so don't go into
this expecting this to be the final version and i expect there to be no issues the whole point of
the beta is to just run through a round of testing and get things checked and fixed before the live
version hits if you're not aware of the stable and the beta release cycle for home assistant then the
stable version releases on the first wednesday of every month and the beta starts on the last
wednesday of every month so for example at the time of recording this it's currently october
so the last wednesday in october will be the start of the beta for the november release which will
be the first wednesday in november makes sense right the next thing i want to point out again
comes back to the fact that this is a beta so i wouldn't recommend installing this on your live
instance of home assistant just in case you do encounter any issues or bugs the last thing you
want is to lose access to various devices or all of them if your smart home goes down and the other
thing you really don't want is to feel the wrath of a disapproving wife that can no longer turn on
the lights now your whole home assistant totally dying is obviously the worst case scenario but
there are a couple of things that you can do to mitigate this and actually recover should this
catastrophic incident actually occur and when i say can do what i actually mean is you should
definitely do so if you are installing the beta then you should definitely be doing these things
i'd say that there's two main things that you need to do when you actually check out the beta
the first one is to actually read through the release notes just like with the stable release
reading through the release notes is going to save you a lot of time and a lot of headaches
you're going to be able to easily identify all the new features and changes and you're also going
to be able to see all the breaking changes so do yourself a favor and save yourself some time and
just have a careful read through the new features and changes and in particular the breaking changes
now you're not going to need to read through every single one as you should be able to spot some of
the ones that will affect you so for example there's a breaking change here for the amazon
echo and google assistant so if you use those services then you might want to check that one
out the next thing that you should definitely be doing before joining the beta is ensuring
you've got an up-to-date backup of your current home assistant instance now there's a couple of
different ways of doing this my preferred method is using the home assistant google drive backup
now if you're not sure what that is or how you go about setting up i have done a little handy video
that you can go and check that out if you want to set up the google drive backer you can also make
use of the inbuilt home assistant backups so to do this all you're going to do is just head down
into your supervisor tab and then up at the top you're going to choose backups from within here
you're going to press this blue button in the bottom right corner that just says create backup
once you've clicked that you're going to be asked to name the backup so give it some kind
of meaningful name to you and then you're also going to need to set the backup type with the
backup type you've got two different choices you've got the full backup or a partial backup
the full backup's going to contain everything within your home assistant instance
and the partial backup's going to allow you to choose individual bits of home assistant that
you want to back up as an optional security layer you can also add password protection
this is going to add a password to the file that's created and you're going to need this password in
order to unlock the backup once you're happy with your selections you can go ahead and click create
it will then just take a couple of minutes to actually create the backup and depending on the
options you went for will determine the length of time it takes to actually create the backup
once that's completed you'll see it appear in this list here with the name that you gave it you
can then select it and you can choose the three dots and you can optionally download that then
so you could download this and save it on your desktop or to your nas or somewhere else safe as
i previously mentioned ideally you don't want to be running this on your live instance but you can
do it and if you do have that backup you do have a bit of a safety net as if you install the beta and
it just doesn't work for you or everything breaks then you can just roll back to that backup and i
know not everyone has extra bits of hardware just lying around that you can just dedicate to a beta
build of home assistant but if you're after a really simple way of actually doing it then
you should check out setting up a virtual machine to actually run home assistant on you could very
easily and quickly spin up a virtual machine just to run the home assistant beta on and over on the
home assistant web page there's a great set of guides for various different virtual machines
so if you're interested in doing that then go and check those guides out they'll be linked in the
description below equally if you're interested in seeing me do a guide on how to actually set
up one of these virtual machines let me know in the comments below so you've read the release
notes you've done your backups and now you're ready to install the beta on your live instance
your virtual machine or some other bit of hardware let's have a look at how we join the beta then
we're going to head over to our home assistant dashboard and from here we're going to want to
choose supervisor up at the top we're then going to choose system from here you'll notice the three
cards at the top for core supervisor and host inside of the supervisor card you'll see this
option here to join the beta channel so we're just going to go ahead and click that you'll then get
this final warning before joining the beta which just reinforces the things that we spoke about
so it's a beta and it can contain unstable code and you should make sure you've got the backups
as we've done that and we're happy we're just going to go ahead and click join beta channel
as soon as you do that you'll see you get two new options so there's now a newer version of the
supervisor available so we've got an update button and then we've also got the option to leave the
beta channel so let's go ahead and press update and then we're just going to confirm that update
with that completed you should see that the supervisor is now the latest version and that
little update button's gone then over on the left there in core we can see that there's now a new
version of core available and if we look at that version number we can see that it's the 2021.11
beta and we've got a little update button next to that so again we're just going to go ahead
and click update there and again we're just going to give that a couple of minutes to update and
do its thing after a few minutes call should fully update and you'll see the page refresh
and once that happens you'll notice that that the newest version is that latest beta version
so congratulations you're now part of the beta whilst you're playing around with the new features
or just testing the beta in general if you do come across any issues then you should definitely
report them on the home assistant github this is going to help yourself and also all the
other home assistant users with reporting issues there's four main sections for issues you've got
core related issues you've got issues with the front end you've got issues with the supervisor
and issues with the documentation make sure that you're submitting your issue to the
relevant section and also be sure to include the beta version number in your issues description
and if you're not sure on any of those things just ask issues that are introduced in the beta are
going to be worked on as a priority so make sure that the thing that you report in is an actual
issue and it's not just a feature request i'll have a link to the home assistant beta release
notes in the description below so if you've got the time and there happens to be a new feature or
a new integration you now know how to beta so go ahead and check it out and be sure to report any
issues that you find and there we go that's how we set up the home assistant beta if you've enjoyed
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