Frigate Home Assistant Integration

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 881 words

Three things must already be running before this integration does anything: a working Frigate NVR, a Home Assistant instance, and one MQTT broker that both of them talk to. The third is the one people forget, and it is the cause of most "integration installed, no events showing" threads. Get those in place and the integration itself is a 5-minute HACS install that turns every camera and every detected object into Home Assistant entities, which is the point at which a camera system stops being something you watch and becomes something that acts.

MQTT is the prerequisite people skip

Frigate publishes object detections, motion state and event lifecycles to MQTT. Home Assistant's own MQTT integration subscribes to the same broker, and the Frigate integration reads those messages to keep its sensors and binary sensors live. If Frigate points at one broker and Home Assistant at another, or Home Assistant has no MQTT integration configured at all, you get camera streams and static config but no real-time state. Run the Mosquitto add-on or a Mosquitto container, give both sides the same host, and confirm in Frigate's own UI that the MQTT indicator is connected before touching the integration.

The integration also talks to Frigate's HTTP API directly for clips, snapshots and recordings, so Frigate's port 5000 must be reachable from Home Assistant. Using the authenticated 8971 port is fine too; just supply credentials. Local network only, in either case.

Install through HACS, point it at the API

The integration is not in Home Assistant core, so it comes through HACS. Add the repository, install, restart Home Assistant, then add "Frigate" under Devices and Services and enter the URL, typically http://frigate.home.lan:5000. It discovers every camera and every configured object type from Frigate's own config; you do not re-declare cameras in Home Assistant. Frigate and the integration are versioned together loosely, and the release notes for each say which pairs are supported. Upgrade Frigate first, then the integration, and read the notes, because Frigate's API has changed shape across major versions and a mismatch shows up as missing entities rather than a clear error.

It is MIT licensed, Python, and adds almost nothing to Home Assistant's memory; the 128 MB in the listing is Home Assistant's cost of hosting it, not the integration's own.

What you get per camera

For each camera: a camera entity for the live stream, a motion binary sensor, an occupancy binary sensor per object type (person, car, dog, whatever Frigate tracks), a count sensor per object type, switches to toggle detection, recording and snapshots on that camera, and a sensor reporting detection and camera frames per second. Globally: a media browser source that lets you scrub Frigate's clips and recordings from the Home Assistant media panel, and events on the bus for the start, update and end of every tracked object.

That set is what makes surveillance-driven automation possible without writing MQTT parsing yourself. The occupancy sensors are the ones to build on; they stay on for as long as Frigate believes the object is in frame, and clear when it leaves.

The automation that justifies the setup

The one everyone builds first is a phone notification with a snapshot when a person is detected at the front door while nobody is home. The community "Frigate Notifications" blueprint does this with a form: pick the camera, pick the object types, set a cooldown, choose zones. It sends the snapshot immediately and updates the notification with the clip when the event ends. From there it is small steps to turning on the porch light when binary_sensor.driveway_car_occupancy flips at night, or pausing detection on the garden camera while the mower runs. The first month with Home Assistant is mostly learning which sensors are trustworthy, and the first month guide covers that habit; Frigate's occupancy sensors are among the most trustworthy you will own, because a Coral or GPU is doing real object detection rather than pixel-difference motion.

Double Take and the card are separate projects

Two related things are not part of this integration. Face recognition is not something Frigate's core object detection does by default; Double Take sits between Frigate and a recognition backend and reports names back through MQTT, and it is its own install. The Frigate Lovelace card, which gives you a purpose-built camera and event timeline UI on your dashboard, is also a separate HACS download from the same maintainer group. Install the integration first, the card second, and Double Take only if you actually need "who", not just "someone".

What I'd do

Stand up Frigate with a Coral or a spare GPU, run Mosquitto as a shared broker, install the integration through HACS, and build the person-at-the-door notification with the community blueprint on day one. Keep everything on the LAN; cloud camera services are the thing this whole video surveillance category exists to replace, and this integration is the free, local link that makes a self-hosted NVR act on what it sees. There is no reason to run Frigate beside Home Assistant without it.