This harness runs retained MQTT discovery messages through Mosquitto and a real Home Assistant container. It verifies the behavior that firmware unit tests cannot: Home Assistant's entity-registry identity, user-owned registry changes, and retained discovery after a Home Assistant restart.

It has two ordered modes:

migration publishes single-component discovery, applies a user rename and disable, then sends migrate_discovery markers, a device bundle, and legacy retained-topic cleanup.
retained-restart runs after Home Assistant restarts and verifies the retained device bundle plus preserved registry customization.

The migration case also rejects malformed retained JSON, checks that a direct single-to-device publication does not duplicate registry identity, exercises the device-component tombstone/omission sequence, and makes the current def_ent_id/no-obj_id schema expectation explicit.

Run locally

From the repository root:

HA_VERSION=2024.11.3 docker compose -f tests/ha-contract/compose.yaml up -d mqtt homeassistant
HA_VERSION=2024.11.3 docker compose -f tests/ha-contract/compose.yaml run --rm tests
HA_VERSION=2024.11.3 docker compose -f tests/ha-contract/compose.yaml restart homeassistant
CONTRACT_MODE=retained-restart HA_VERSION=2024.11.3 docker compose -f tests/ha-contract/compose.yaml run --rm tests
HA_VERSION=2024.11.3 docker compose -f tests/ha-contract/compose.yaml down -v

Use HA_VERSION=stable and HA_VERSION=dev for the current supported and development Home Assistant images.

The checked-in GitHub workflow runs the baseline, stable, and development images as a compatibility audit. When it is on the repository's default branch, GitHub exposes it for manual dispatch and the weekly schedule. It is not a tag-release gate.

For a local development-image test, add CONTRACT_EXPECT_DISABLED_CLEANUP=1 to both docker compose run ... tests commands. That lane checks that initially disabled device components are cleaned. The test uses only ephemeral named volumes; down -v removes its broker data, Home Assistant config, owner token, and registry state.

Scope

The firmware's native Unity suite covers JSON escaping, invalid topic tokens, serializer preflight, migration ordering, component removal, and lifecycle behavior. This container suite covers Home Assistant's persistence contract. It does not need a physical board: fixture discovery documents mirror retained payloads emitted by ArduinoHA and isolate Home Assistant/MQTT compatibility.