Entity Metadata Persistence for Home Assistant

A general-purpose Home Assistant integration that exports, imports, and backs-up entity metadata such as friendly name, visibility, and enabled status. Useful for preserving these values across integration resets.

If you have ever had to remove a device integration (e.g., Z-Wave, etc.) and lost your carefully curated entity metadata, you know why we created this...

Features 💡

• Export/import metadata for any Home Assistant entities
• Support for friendly_name, enabled, and visible
• Manual export/import triggers
• Option to automatically import at Home Assistant startup
• Configurable backup retention (# of copies)
• UI-based configuration via Home Assistant's Integrations panel

Installation via HACS 📦

1. Go to HACS → ⋮ menu → Custom Repositories
2. Add https://github.com/jderose-net/hacs-entity-metadata as an Integration repository
3. Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration
4. Add Entity Metadata
5. Restart Home Assistant
6. Configure via Settings → Devices & Services → Entity Metadata → Configure

Options 🔁

Accessible via the integration's ⚙️ menu:

• Export All Entities
  Includes entities that have no overrides (empty {} objects). Helpful for full inventories and bulk editing. Note: If you later import with the entity_metadata.import_overrides service and merge: false, these empty entries will reset name/icon/hidden/disabled. Keep merge: true for safety.

• Domains
  Multi-select filter applied during export. Example: ["light", "switch"].

• Backup retention
  Number of timestamped backup files to keep under
  /config/etc/entity_metadata/backups/. Older backups are pruned after each export.

• Auto-Import on Startup
  If enabled, runs entity_metadata.import_overrides with merge: true on Home Assistant start.

• Export Now
  One-shot action in the Options form that immediately triggers an export (writes overrides.yaml and a timestamped backup). This toggle is not persisted.

Paths

• Overrides: /config/etc/entity_metadata/overrides.yaml
• Backups: /config/etc/entity_metadata/backups/overrides-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.yaml

Services 🛠

Service	Description
entity_metadata.export_overrides	Export metadata values to overrides.yaml file
entity_metadata.import_overrides	Import metadata values from overrides.yaml file

Files 🗂

• config/etc/entity_metadata/overrides.yaml
• config/etc/entity_metadata/backups/overrides.YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.yaml

Codeowners 🧑💻

@john-derose

License 🪪

MIT