Home Assistant

Fregata exposes the same HTTP API and MQTT topics as upstream Frigate, so the official Frigate Home Assistant integration works unchanged. You install it in HA, point it at your Mac’s IP and port 8971, and Fregata’s cameras, events, and detection state appear as HA entities.

Home Assistant isn’t required for phone alerts

If all you want is alerts on your phone, you can skip Home Assistant and MQTT. Fregata Mobile, the free iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch app (public beta), sends alerts with the picture, then a clip, straight from your own NVR, and it works alongside Home Assistant if you use both. See Push notifications to your phone.

What you’ll get in HA

Once the integration is connected, each Fregata camera produces:

• camera.<name> — the live MJPEG/MSE feed for the dashboard.
• binary_sensor.<name>_motion — true while motion is in progress.
• binary_sensor.<name>_<object> — one per tracked class (_person, _car, etc.), true while that object is in frame.
• sensor.<name>_<object>_count — current count of that class.
• switch.<name>_detect, _recordings, _snapshots — toggles for the per-camera features.

Plus a global update.frigate_server, and a media_source for playing back recordings and event clips inside HA.

Setup

1. Install HACS in Home Assistant (if you haven’t)

The Frigate HA integration ships through HACS, not core HA. Follow HACS installation if you don’t already have it.

2. Add the Frigate integration to HACS

In HA: HACS → Integrations → ⋮ → Custom repositories and add:

https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate-hacs-integration

…as an “Integration” repository. Then search for “Frigate” in the HACS Integrations list and install.

Restart HA.

3. Configure the integration

Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → Frigate.

In the URL field, enter the HTTPS address your HA instance can reach Fregata at:

https://<mac-ip-or-hostname>:8971

For example, https://10.0.1.42:8971 or https://mac-mini.local:8971.

Fregata serves HTTPS with a self-signed certificate by default, so turn off “Validate SSL” in the integration’s config — otherwise HA won’t trust the certificate. The Frigate integration has that checkbox for exactly this case.

Caution

Use the LAN IP / hostname, not 127.0.0.1 or localhost, unless you’re running HA on the same Mac as Fregata. HA needs to reach the Mac from wherever it’s running.

Reaching it from outside your LAN

For remote access, front Fregata with a reverse proxy that has a real certificate (see Network & remote access) and point HA at the proxy’s https://… URL — then you can leave Validate SSL on.

4. (Optional) MQTT

For best responsiveness you’ll also want MQTT — HA gets push events when objects appear and disappear instead of polling. Point Fregata at your MQTT broker.

To keep the password out of config.yml, first add a FRIGATE_MQTT_PASSWORD variable in the tray’s Settings → Environment Variables… and choose Restart Now (Frigate only sees new variables after a restart, and it rejects a {FRIGATE_…} name it doesn’t know). Then use {FRIGATE_MQTT_PASSWORD} as the password below. Or paste the password in plaintext if you’re not the secrets-management type; Fregata’s config never leaves the Mac.

Settings UI

1. In the web UI, go to Settings → System → MQTT.
2. Turn on Enable MQTT.
3. Set MQTT host to your broker (HA’s Mosquitto add-on is fine) and MQTT port to 1883.
4. Set MQTT username (for example fregata) and MQTT password: type {FRIGATE_MQTT_PASSWORD} (after adding the variable, as above) or the password itself.
5. Click Save, then Restart when the page asks.

YAML

mqtt:
  enabled: true
  host: 10.0.1.42      # your MQTT broker; HA's Mosquitto add-on is fine
  port: 1883
  user: fregata
  password: "{FRIGATE_MQTT_PASSWORD}"

Restart Frigate from the tray to pick up the MQTT settings.

Automations

The integration’s docs at blakeblackshear.github.io/frigate-hacs-integration have a full walkthrough of automations. The two most useful starting templates:

Person on the front porch

automation:
  - alias: Notify on front-porch person
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: binary_sensor.front_porch_person
        to: 'on'
    action:
      - service: notify.mobile_app_my_phone
        data:
          message: "Person on front porch"
          data:
            image: "/api/frigate/notifications/{{ trigger.to_state.attributes.event_id }}/snapshot.jpg"

Auto-disable detection while you’re home

automation:
  - alias: Pause Fregata detection when home
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: person.you
        to: home
    action:
      - service: switch.turn_off
        target:
          entity_id:
            - switch.front_porch_detect
            - switch.driveway_detect

The second one is a common privacy ask — pause object detection on indoor cameras when you’re physically there. Recordings keep going unless you also flip _recordings.

Or use Frigate’s Profiles feature instead

Flipping individual switches per camera is the simplest approach, but Frigate’s Profiles feature — named, runtime-togglable bundles of per-camera overrides (masks, notifications, alert labels, even whether a camera is enabled at all) — covers this exact Home/Away use case more cleanly once you’re juggling more than one or two cameras. Profiles activate via the Frigate UI, MQTT (so the same automation trigger above can publish a profile name instead of toggling switches), or Home Assistant.

Troubleshooting the integration

The most common failure modes:

• Cameras don’t appear — the integration couldn’t reach Fregata’s /api/config. Open the URL you configured above in a browser on the same network as HA. If it doesn’t load, the issue is between HA and your Mac, not in the integration.
• Clips/snapshots fail to play in HA — the integration uses media_source URIs that point back at the Fregata HTTP server. HA needs to be able to reach those URIs from whichever browser you’re viewing HA on. If you’re on a VPN or different subnet, you may need to expose Fregata via your reverse proxy too.
• Counts stay at zero — MQTT isn’t connected. Check the Frigate log via the tray’s Settings → Open Frigate Logs; an MQTT connection failure appears prominently.