Operating

Back up and move Household

One command saves everything — every workspace, every bot — into one file; another puts it back, on this machine or a new one. There is no export of a single workspace or bot yet, and no backup button in the admin (Backup in its menu is still soon).

Back up

# Saves household-YYYYMMDD-HHMM.tar.gz in the current folder, or where you say:
house export
house export ~/backups/house.tar.gz

The daemon can keep running: each bot pauses for a moment while its files are copied, and messages to it wait. Close all sideworkers first.

The archive holds:

• the config, household.yaml: workspaces, bots, channels, owners, network rules, inboxes, keys, secrets and bot tokens;
• the database: chat history, memory, scheduled tasks, inbox events;
• every bot's home folder: its projects, sessions, skills, instructions and anything it installed there;
• the workspace's shared skills, ChatGPT subscription logins, and the certificate bots trust.

Not included: logs, and what a bot installed outside its home — its Setup script brings that back on the first start.

The archive contains your keys and tokens in plain form. It is saved readable only by you (mode 600); keep it like a password file.

Restore

Stop the daemon (Ctrl-C in its terminal), then:

house import household-20261109-0300.tar.gz
house doctor
house start

On a machine that already has a Household, import refuses to overwrite anything. --force replaces it: the current config, database and certificate are moved aside as *.bak-… files, and the bots' home folders are replaced.

A backup from an older Household restores with a warning. One from a newer Household is refused: house update first.

Move to another machine

1. house export on the old machine.
2. Install Household on the new one; skip house onboard.
3. Copy the archive over, then house import <file> and house start.

Stop the daemon on the old machine before starting the new one: both would answer the same bots.

Just the config

household.yaml is a plain file in ~/.config/household/. You can keep a copy, edit it by hand and run house reload to apply it. It alone does not carry chat history, memory or the bots' files: for those, use house export.

When a new version has to migrate the config or the database, Household copies both aside first, as it starts. house migrate backups lists those copies; house migrate restore <name> puts one back.

Config migration 4 moves the old top-level secrets into houses.<name>.secrets. Shared secrets become independent copies in each existing recipient workspace; restricted secrets stay only in their named workspaces. New workspaces inherit none. If a destination is missing or already has the same secret name, migration stops without overwriting it.

Manage these credentials in the workspace’s Secrets menu. CLI commands now include the workspace, for example house secret add work github --host api.github.com --env GITHUB_TOKEN (the value is read from stdin). Before editing an old configuration, restart Household to run migrations with a backup, or stop it and run house migrate apply.