Remote dashboard for esphome?

ESPHome
1

Hi,
My HA setup is quite slow at compiling esphome binaries so I was looking at a) changing the docker container of esphome to cross compile from another node or probably simpler b) install esphome on another machine and then just add the link in the HA sidebar - is this possible? My google-fu has been quite weak here!

Thanks!

2

Option b:

https://esphome.io/guides/installing_esphome

Not sure about the sidebar link. Maybe:

1 Like
3

Simple docker compose:

version: '2.1'
services:
    esphome:
        container_name: esphome
        volumes:
            - ./cache:/cache
            - ./config:/config
            - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
        restart: unless-stopped
        image: esphome/esphome:stable
        network_mode: host
4

I went with Option b. Never looked back. I kept the ESPHome Add-on in HA, but can’t remember the last time I even opened it.

ESPHome is the development environment for setting up your ESP devices. HA is a production environment which communicates with all your different kinds of devices, including ESP devices. There’s really no need to mix those two different functions.

1 Like
5

I should have been clearer - I have esphome installed on the other system. Not an issue - I can flash etc. What I want to know is do I then remove the esphome addon in HA or can I have it point to my other setup.

6

Same here - my HA system is not powerfull enough to compile the program (for an empty one it failed a few time, for the more complete one it fails).

So I’m looking for the method to compile on the PC - but just compiling the downloaded yaml already requires to add a secrets.yaml.

After doing a python install of esphome ( -m pip install esphome) and having the installed esphome’s directory in the PATH, I could compile and upload the downloaded config using esphome upload config/objectname.yaml.

So I used the ESPHOME dashboard in HA, downloaded the yaml for the device I set up in ESPHOME under HA, and compiled and uploaded from my PC.

While that fixed the reason for the question, it does not answer the original question that I was also trying to get answered: how to run a dashboard server on my PC for the ESPHOME instance running on a lightweight HA machine.

7

AFAIK ESPHome Dashboard available for docker only:

So, probably Windows PC + docker + ESPHome Dashoard + HA shared /config/esphome directory can work.

8

The dashboard command worked fine on my Windows laptop.

I found it a lot easier to just use the esphome run command on my laptop. If I want a “pretty” display I can always use the add-on in HA, although I never do updates from there.

9

In my case the page was “empty” (I had esphome related html content, but nothing to show for). Probably because of

Failed to load module script: Expected a JavaScript module script but the server responded with a MIME type of "text/plain". Strict MIME type checking is enforced for module scripts per HTML spec.

I am just starting with ESPHome, but I prefer to centralize the configurations in Home Assistant + how is HA going to know about the secrets “automatically”.

While I work on windows, I have a *nix like command line and I found I can get the configuration using the following (with the ssh terminal installed in HA):

scp [email protected]:/homeassistant/esphome/*  config

That’s fine for now - I plan to upgrade my HA system when I find the time.

10

Yup, many different options. That’s what’s so great about HA!

I found I never used the ESPHome add-on in HA. Compiling took forever on my RPi 3B+, and I figured all those writes weren’t doing the SD card any good. Other than that, HA runs fine on the RPi, single-digit CPU utilization and around 50% memory. It’s a quick, clean, supported and low-maintenance setup, so I have no reason to update the hardware anytime soon.

Doing HA or ESPHome development, I’m usually on my laptop anyway. So it makes very little difference to me whether I’m doing it through a web-based UI on the RPi or natively on the laptop. I never even look at the ESPHome add-on in HA any more.