ESPHome without Home Assistant: reaching it remotely

ESPHome is firmware, and a good one — a clean configuration model, a large library of supported sensors, and local control that keeps working when your internet does not. Paired with Home Assistant inside the house it is genuinely hard to beat.

It is also local-first on purpose, which is why “how do I see this from work” is one of the most repeated questions in the community and one of the least well answered. The threads are plentiful; the write-ups are not.

What ESPHome gives you on its own

A device runs standalone. With the web server component enabled you can open its IP on your network and see current values and controls. No Home Assistant required.

What you do not get is the layer above: history beyond what is on screen, dashboards spanning several devices, automations across boards, or alerting. ESPHome does not claim to provide those — it is firmware, and that is the boundary.

The four remote options

The first three make your network reachable from outside. The fourth reverses the direction: the device sends readings out, so nothing inbound is required at all.

That last one is worth understanding properly, because it composes with the others rather than replacing them.

Keeping ESPHome and adding remote

The honest configuration for most people is not a migration. It is ESPHome continuing to do local control exactly as it does now, plus an outbound POST so the readings are also somewhere you can reach.

ESPHome’s http_request component makes HTTPS POSTs with a JSON body and custom headers. By default it validates certificates against ESP-IDF’s bundled CA set, so this is a properly verified connection rather than one with checks disabled.

Pointing it at a nodrix deployment is one block of YAML:

# Local control is unchanged — this is added alongside it.
api:
  encryption:
    key: !secret api_key

http_request:
  verify_ssl: true          # uses ESP-IDF's bundled CA set
  timeout: 10s

sensor:
  - platform: bme280_i2c
    temperature:
      name: "Greenhouse temperature"
      id: temp
    humidity:
      name: "Greenhouse humidity"
      id: humidity
    address: 0x76
    update_interval: 60s

# Push a copy outward every five minutes.
interval:
  - interval: 5min
    then:
      - http_request.post:
          url: https://nodrix.you.workers.dev/v1/telemetry
          request_headers:
            Content-Type: application/json
            Authorization: !secret nodrix_token
          json:
            metrics:
              temperature: !lambda return id(temp).state;
              humidity: !lambda return id(humidity).state;
          on_error:
            then:
              - logger.log: "telemetry post failed"

Points worth noting:

• The api: block is untouched. Home Assistant keeps its native connection, local automations keep running, and none of that depends on the POST succeeding.
• Variables appear on first sight. There is no schema to define on the receiving end — send temperature and a temperature variable exists.
• Five minutes, not sixty seconds. The local sensor updates every minute for local automations; the outbound copy is for remote viewing and alerting, where a five-minute resolution is usually plenty and uses a fraction of the request budget.
• on_error logs rather than retries. A failed POST should not disturb a device whose primary job is local control.

What that gets you

The readings now exist somewhere reachable without a VPN, a tunnel, or an inbound port, in a deployment in your own Cloudflare account:

• Dashboards that stream over a WebSocket and can be shared read-only by link — which is how you show someone the greenhouse without giving them access to your home network.
• Automations on variable, schedule and sunrise/sunset triggers, sending to Telegram, Discord, Slack or email. Useful for the alerts you want to arrive whether or not you are home.
• A read API behind one token, for Grafana or an app of your own.
• History beyond what the device holds in memory.

Local control stays where it belongs. If your internet drops, ESPHome and Home Assistant carry on exactly as before and the outbound posts simply resume when the connection returns.

Choosing

• Everything is inside the house and stays there. ESPHome plus Home Assistant. Nothing here improves on that.
• You want remote access to the whole Home Assistant instance. Nabu Casa, or Tailscale if you prefer to run it yourself. Both are good answers.
• You want specific readings visible and alerting reliably from anywhere, including to people who will not install a VPN. Push them outward. It composes with either of the above.
• You are starting fresh, remote-first, and have no Home Assistant. Then the question is different — a device reporting outbound from the start does not need the local platform at all, and connecting an ESP32 over HTTPS is the shorter path.

The framing that causes trouble is treating this as a choice between platforms. ESPHome is firmware and a backend is a backend; the reason the forum threads go in circles is that people keep looking for one thing that does both, when running both is straightforward and neither has to lose.