Home Assistant

camera.ui works with Home Assistant in two ways that have nothing to do with each other. You can run camera.ui inside Home Assistant with the app, and you can connect an existing camera.ui to Home Assistant with the integration. They are separate jobs, so you can do either or both: the app runs the server, the integration surfaces its cameras and sensors as HA entities.

Running vs connecting

• The app runs camera.ui. It installs the camera.ui server as a Home Assistant OS app, so your cameras, recordings, and detection live on the same box as HA. This is a way to host camera.ui, nothing more.
• The integration connects camera.ui. It talks to a camera.ui server (the app, or a Docker/desktop install anywhere on your network) and creates one HA device per camera with live streams, sensors, and PTZ. This is how entities show up in HA.

If you run the app, you still add the integration to get entities into Home Assistant. If your camera.ui already runs elsewhere, you only need the integration.

Getting entities in: pick one transport

There are two independent ways to get camera.ui cameras and sensors into Home Assistant as entities:

1. The integration (recommended). A custom component that pushes entities to HA over a local connection. No broker needed.
2. MQTT discovery. An opt-in on the camera.ui server's MQTT bridge that publishes Home Assistant discovery configs to your broker.

These two do not merge. Home Assistant treats them as unrelated, so running both leaves you with two copies of every camera: two devices, two motion sensors, two of everything. Pick one.

Do not run both

The integration and MQTT discovery duplicate each other. Pick one. Use the integration unless you specifically want to route camera.ui through an existing MQTT broker.

The integration

Recommended for most setups. It connects straight to camera.ui with no MQTT broker involved. Live camera changes arrive by push, and it re-checks the camera list once a minute as a backstop.

You get, per camera:

• A live camera entity with streaming. Snapshots and the live source (high, mid, or low RTSP) come straight from camera.ui.
• Motion and object-detection sensors. Object sensors cover the labels person, vehicle, animal, and package.
• Sensors across the binary_sensor, sensor, switch, light, siren, lock, cover, and alarm_control_panel domains. Switches, lights, sirens, locks, covers, and alarm panels are controllable from Home Assistant; contact and measurement sensors are read-only.
• A PTZ service, cameraui.ptz, for continuous, stop, move, absolute, preset, and home actions.

On top of that, the integration registers the cameraui-card Lovelace resource, embeds the full camera.ui web UI as a sidebar panel, and fires a cameraui_event on the HA event bus for every detection, with device triggers wired up for the automation editor. Setup can start from zeroconf: camera.ui advertises itself over mDNS, so host and port are pre-filled and you only enter an access token.

See Integration for the full setup.

MQTT discovery

Use this only if you already run an MQTT broker and want camera.ui to speak through it. Its one real advantage is that it needs no custom component and no HACS: the camera.ui server publishes retained discovery configs, and Home Assistant's built-in MQTT integration picks them up.

You turn it on in the camera.ui server's MQTT settings (enable HA discovery). You get status, motion, and object binary sensors, a snapshot camera image, and the same controllable sensor domains as the integration. What you do not get: a live stream (snapshot only), the PTZ service, the sidebar panel, the auto-registered card, or the cameraui_event bus events. MQTT does add one thing the integration handles differently: a dedicated per-camera connectivity sensor.

MQTT discovery is documented with the rest of the broker settings on the MQTT admin page.

Integration vs MQTT discovery

	Integration	MQTT discovery
Needs an MQTT broker	No	Yes
Custom component / HACS	Required	Not needed
Live camera stream	Yes	Snapshot only
Motion & object sensors	Yes	Yes
Controllable sensors	Yes	Yes
PTZ service	Yes	No
Per-camera connectivity sensor	No separate one	Yes
Embedded web UI panel	Yes	No
Lovelace card auto-registered	Yes	No
cameraui_event + device triggers	Yes	No
Discovery	zeroconf (mDNS)	over MQTT

Bringing Home Assistant sensors in

The integration and MQTT both send camera.ui out to Home Assistant. The Home Assistant plugin goes the other way: it imports Home Assistant's own sensors and controls into camera.ui, where you can assign them to cameras and use them as detection triggers. It is separate from the two transports above and does not clash with them.

See Import from Home Assistant for setup.

The Lovelace card

The cameraui-card shows a camera's live stream with a PTZ overlay on your dashboards. With the integration it is registered for you automatically; you just add it to a view.

See Lovelace card for how to place and configure it.

Next steps

• App — run the camera.ui server inside Home Assistant OS.
• Integration — connect a camera.ui server and get cameras, sensors, and PTZ as HA entities.
• Lovelace card — put a camera with PTZ on your dashboard.
• Import from Home Assistant — bring Home Assistant's own sensors and controls into camera.ui.