Hi there!
Im a little stumped here. Im playing around with configs, and ESPHome is recompiling EVERYTHING every time. It’s a 10 minute wait to change a single parameter. Surely this can’t be the default? Surely I forgot to check a cache checkbox somewhere. Please say it isn’t so! Any help would be lovely 
Im running HA on a Raspi 3 B1.2 with a Class 10 SD card
Versions :
Home Assistant 2023.10.5
Supervisor 2023.10.0
Operating System 10.5
Frontend 20231005.0 - latest
ESPHome 2023.10.1
If you add or remove components (the ESPHome definition of component) then yes - it will do a full compile.
Anything that requires addition or removal of a library will force a full compile. But changing a sensor config, or adding a new sensor of component of the same type generally won’t.
10 minutes is long. My biggest device takes 5 at most on a Pi 4 with limited (2Gb) of memory.
Use a slow computer, get slow results.
Rpi3 is fine for running Home Assistant and many people do, but the ESPHome compiler wants lots of processor time. So, yes this is probably normal. I wouldn’t know if ten minutes on a Pi3 is normal because I haven’t run Home Assistant and the ESPHome plug in on a Pi3 for years.
I run Home Assistant on a used Intel NUC i3 that I bought on eBay for a little over $100. Compiling an ESPHome binary takes me about 60-seconds.
Being basically impatient, I now compile on my laptop. It’s pretty easy to install and compile from there. Saves my poor RPi a lot of work, and me a lot of time.
I’ve been thinking about doing this as well. I have a nuc running HA, but right now I have 5 esphome devices, and once a month compiling them all gets my fans revving up already. And I’m looking to expand on the esp’s with the echo, and a few more plugs. So yeah might just be easier that way
Lightweight. I have 71 ESPHome devices…
Just for fun, I did install ESPHome on my PC and a compile finished in:
“[SUCCESS] Took 3.68 seconds”
Yeah I kept lights, temperature and motion sensors on zigbee (deconz) and it’s pretty low/no maintenance so I’m sticking to it.
Initially I only had a BT proxy and a DHT sensor on esphome, but lately it became difficult to find decent plugs with power monitoring that work on zigbee. Innr 120 is no longer produced, the 220 is without power monitoring. I’ve tried some aqara, but coupled with deconz there’s a bug that multiplies consumption 10x. So now I’m replacing the buggy plugs with esphome ones (athom.tech) and while at it, I bought their ir-blaster too. I’ll be replacing switches with ir-blasters in each room when replacement is needed, so nr of esphome will rise no doubt
The HA runs on a slightly older nuc i3, but literally next to it sits my ‘mini server’ for my dockers/dns/ect (asus pn51) so I’ll probably check to run esphome in docker on that host later on
Ah, wild. OK, Thats unexpected. Docker has a lot of caching functionality that would normally help with something like this, even on a low power machine. Sure, yes, the primary code needs to be but it’s literally downloading platformIO and ESPTools afresh each time.
Ah no, this doesn’t seem to be the intended behaviour.
Looking into the ESPHome repo the docker entry point tries to handle cacheing.
OK, need to dig a little
If you don’t change anything, then a recompile takes only a second. I will often do a “manual download” first to check for errors before doing a WiFi install. If I’ve changed nothing, the compile is like one or two seconds.
erm… poked it with a stick for a bit and suddenly caching works.
that is… less than satisfying
Were you able to get ESPHOME to no re-compile everything for every update for identical devices? I have a bunch of Sonoff S31s that take a while to update every time. I’m running HA on a Dell 9020 so I would have assumed it was pretty quick.
I’m just guessing but it seems like it doesn’t know when it actually finished installing and so therefore never saves the cache?
I have to hit stop every time.
It will start logging the new firmware to the screen. Be patient.
i use 1st gen NUC with celeron takes 3 min per node i have 26 nodes. its like a 12 yo pc but is max 15 watts. im ok with slow and cheap and reliable. ill prolly use it till the caps blow out.
Sorry to resurrect an old thread but what I’ve seen above does not really make sense to me in relation to the topic title. (And this complete rebuild has nothing to do with the speed of the whole build process.)
I can understand a complete rebuild if there is an update to the framework etc. but in my case I simply enabled the logging feature.
Now, I assume that the logging module was previously compiled along with everything else previously. Therefore all that is really needed is to recompile the code generated from the yaml and relink to now include the reference to the logger module.
At the start of the build log, it says that it is using CMake - therefore it *should be checking the various dates of the object files/library entries against the source dates and only selecting those that actually DO need recompiling.
Why is this not the case?
Adding or removing a component will typically result in a full rebuild. The logger in particular changes some program-wide defines so it’s definitely necessary in that case.
Once a component is added, then changes to the config for that component will not trigger a full rebuild.
