ESPro

ESPro turns physical ESPHome devices into swappable infrastructure beneath stable logical identities.

The Problem

ESPHome ties device identity to physical hardware. When a broken device gets replaced:

• All Home Assistant entity IDs change
• Dashboards break
• Automations need manual updates
• 30+ minutes of recovery work per device

This tool aims to simplify device comissioning and management for professional installers and power users who want to treat home infrastructure as code.

The Solution

Hardware abstraction layer for ESPHome.

Home Assistant connects to stable logical devices (outdoor_light_1), not physical hardware. When a device breaks, update a config file and restart—entity IDs stay stable, automations keep working.

# config/devices.yaml
logical_devices:
  outdoor_light_1:
    physical: esp-sonoff-1.local

  chicken_scale:
    physical: esp32-coop.local

Device dies? Change the IP, reload ESPro mappings. Done.

Architecture

Home Assistant (stable entity IDs)
    ↓
ESPro (device registry + proxy)
    ↓
Physical ESPHome Devices (swappable)

Three layers with clear responsibilities:

• ESPHome - Firmware and I/O
• ESPro - Hardware abstraction and lifecycle management
• Home Assistant - Automations and UI

Philosophy

Boring technology: Docker, YAML, Git, REST—nothing exotic.

Plain text wins: Configuration in Git-tracked YAML. No database, ever. Audit trail via git log, rollback via git revert, backup via git push.

Infrastructure as code: Reproducible deployments. Version-controlled configuration. Offline-capable.

Unix philosophy: Do one thing well—provide hardware abstraction. Don't replace ESPHome or Home Assistant.

Status

Early development. Validating technical feasibility and gathering community feedback.

Target audience: Professional installers managing 10-1000+ devices across single or multiple sites who need reproducible deployments and version stability.

Questions?

This is a proof-of-concept. Feedback is welcome.

Development

Quick start:

1. Install uv
2. Install dependencies: uv sync
3. Run CLI: uv run espro --help
4. Run tests: uv run pytest

Available invoke tasks (optional, install with uv tool install invoke):

• invoke lint - Run ruff and mypy
• invoke test - Run tests with coverage
• invoke clean - Remove untracked files (interactive)

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.