LocalSky: self-hosted hyperlocal weather + smart irrigation, with a native HA integration (beta)

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I have been building this for the past few months and just published it: LocalSky is a self-hosted weather and smart-irrigation server that runs as one Docker container on your own hardware, and pairs with Home Assistant through a native integration.

The short version: it pulls live weather from your own station (Tempest over UDP, Ecowitt gateways polled locally, Davis WLL, Ambient, and more), merges in forecast models (Open-Meteo worldwide, NWS in the US, MET Norway, OpenWeather, Pirate Weather), and uses FAO-56 Penman-Monteith evapotranspiration to decide, schedule, and run your irrigation. It talks to controllers directly (OpenSprinkler, Rachio, Rain Bird, Hydrawise, B-hyve, MQTT), so watering keeps working even if HA is down.

What HA gets through the integration:

  • Every weather reading as sensors, with device classes so unit conversion follows your HA settings

  • Per-zone soil moisture, planned runtime, running state, and valves (real valve entities)

  • Today's run/skip verdict with the reason

  • Services: localsky.run_zone, stop_zone, stop_all, pause, resume

  • Zeroconf discovery: it finds your LocalSky on the network, no host typing

Install is HACS custom repository for now (catalog submission is in review): add https://github.com/silenthooligan/localsky-hacs, install, restart. Full guide: Home Assistant integration - LocalSky

If you run Smart Irrigation or Irrigation Unlimited today: I ran that exact stack for years and wrote a migration guide for moving the watering brain out of HA while keeping HA as the dashboard, including what happens during HA outages and how to clean up the old entities afterward: Migrating watering off Home Assistant - LocalSky

Try it without installing anything: https://demo.localsky.io runs with synthetic weather and four demo zones.

It is a beta. There is a feedback button in the app that pre-fills a GitHub issue with your version attached, and I am triaging daily. Site: https://localsky.io / Source (Apache-2.0): GitHub - silenthooligan/localsky: Hyperlocal weather + smart irrigation on your hardware. Local-first, no cloud, no subscription. Optional Home Assistant pairing. · GitHub

Happy to answer anything about the engine math, the integration, or the migration path.

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Good work for a first shot. But there are still some issues.
Some problems I discovered:

  • Tried to use an NFS mount for the volume, but LocalSky’s forces a uuid my Synology refuses.
  • Dashboard only works with Tempest data and ignores local weather sensors.
  • Temperatures are expected in imperial. Local weather sources with celsius don't work.
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Thanks Mario, you were right on all three. Your post sent me down a rabbit hole and I've been heads-down on it for the last week and a half. Fixing those three kept turning up more stuff underneath, so I ended up rebuilding a good chunk of it for stability.

All three are sorted in 0.7.2:

  • Non-Tempest sources actually drive the dashboard now. The whole source layer got rebuilt, so Ecowitt, Ambient, Davis and the rest are first-class, not Tempest-with-extras.
  • Metric sources read correctly, and you pick your own display units.
  • The NFS/UID one: it no longer forces the chown. On a squashed Synology export it falls back to running as the volume's actual owner, or you can pin PUID/PGID.

Would love it if you'd give it another go and tell me if it holds up. demo.localsky.io runs the same build if you want a peek first, and the feedback button files an issue with your version attached. Still triaging daily.

Thanks again, this made it better.