Five years, everyone who installed Home Assistant first memorized :8123. In the release 2026.8 on August 5, 2026 this port ceased to be mandatory — but only for new installations, and this is more important than the news itself. Below is what exactly changed, who will be affected by the port change, and which four things will break on update.
Two days after the release, a patch 2026.8.1 was released — standard practice for Home Assistant. It makes sense to upgrade to it right away, and not to a “round” version.
Port: what actually happened
The wording from the official release notes: “New installations of Home Assistant OS now use a normal web address by default, with no number to add on the end”.
Key word — new. Already running installations continue to live on 8123, and the update itself does not move anything. Migration is voluntary, via the web server settings in the UI.
Developers anticipated what is usually forgotten with such changes: if the new settings turn out not to work, Home Assistant will roll them back automatically within five minutes. In other words, the scenario “switched the port during an SSH session, which then dropped, and you lost access to the panel” is closed at the product level.
Changing the port to 80 is not a free operation if something else on the same machine is listening on 80. A reverse proxy in front of Home Assistant, Nginx Proxy Manager, Traefik, a separate web server — all of this can conflict. Port 80 is busier than it seems: even without an explicit web server, it can be held by the router’s UI in bridge mode or by a container that was started once for testing.
Before switching it’s worth simply checking: ss -tlnp | grep ':80 '.
And separately: port 80 is HTTP without encryption. Inside a trusted home network this is acceptable, but if Home Assistant is exposed externally, the setup remains the same — a reverse proxy with a certificate in front, and the HA itself listening anywhere.
What will break on update
There aren’t many breaking changes in this release, but three out of four hit specific hardware.
| What | Who is affected | What to do |
|---|---|---|
Removed deprecated battery_level property for vacuum robots |
eight vacuum integrations | replace in templates and automations with a separate battery level entity |
| UniFi Protect: requires version 7.1+ | UniFi Protect users on old firmware | upgrade the controller before updating Home Assistant |
| UniFi Protect: AI Port device support removed | those who have AI Port | entities will disappear, automations on them will stop triggering |
| Volvo On Call declared deprecated entirely | Volvo owners with the old integration | switch to the new Volvo integration |
| Paperless-ngx: minimum server version raised to 2.19 | self-hosters of Paperless-ngx | update Paperless itself to the HA update |
The rule is simple: in two out of five updates you should update the external service first, then Home Assistant. Reversing the order yields a non-working integration and an extra hour figuring out why.
The rest: wording work
The main part of the release is not functionality but the language of the interface. From about 43 places words like “advanced” and “expert” were removed; “Developer Tools” became simply “Tools”. The team describes the principle as: “describing the feature, not the user” — name the function, not characterize the person who uses it.
The practical consequence is exactly one, but annoying: all instructions and screenshots on the internet now refer to sections differently than your interface. Guides, including forum ones, will gradually diverge from reality — keep this in mind when something “cannot be found”.
What else has fundamentally changed:
- Entity identifiers can now be renamed manually and their order managed. Previously
entity_idwas generated automatically by domain — and after moving a device from one room to another you ended up with a mess likelight.kitchen_bedroom_lamp. - Devices are organized by integrations. Previously one physical device, visible through two integrations, could collapse into one card with conflicting data. Now each integration keeps its own data.
- Home Assistant Cloud received step-by-step setup instead of, in the authors’ words, an “options wall”.
Renaming entity_id is the most risky among the “harmless” new features. The entity identifier is embedded in automations, scripts, templates, dashboards, cards, integrations with external systems and in the history database. Home Assistant can update references in its own objects, but not in others: MQTT bridges, Node-RED, scripts on the side, exporters to Prometheus or InfluxDB.
If you decide to tidy up — do it in one go, with a backup first and a list of changed identifiers afterward.
Steps
First — backup and check external services (UniFi Protect, Paperless-ngx), then update to 2026.8.1, then read the full list of breaking changes for your integrations. Delaying the port change to 80 is advisable: it doesn’t fix anything and it doesn’t speed things up, and a reverse proxy conflict can be created.
If Home Assistant runs in an LXC on Proxmox, the order is the same, but snapshotting the container is cheaper than built-in backup: [install and basic setup of Proxmox for Home Assistant part 1] and for what happens to a smart home when the internet is completely down, there’s a [separate stress test] on the forum.
Sources
- Home Assistant 2026.8 — official release notes — release date, wording about the address without a port, auto-rollback of settings, list of breaking changes
Who has already switched to the address without :8123 — what had to be moved to port 80? And a separate question for those who have HA accessible from outside: do you even consider this setting or do you still have a reverse proxy in front and the port of HA itself does not matter?