pulumi-reolink

Manage your Reolink camera and doorbell settings as Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi — declarative, versioned, and drift-corrected. It connects directly to your cameras/doorbells over HTTP using reolink-aio — the same library that powers Home Assistant's official Reolink integration.

See specs/spec.md for the full technical specification.

Installation

pip install pulumi-reolink

Getting Started

1. Bootstrap your existing cameras

From your Pulumi project directory, run the interactive bootstrap CLI against each camera you want to manage:

python -m pulumi_reolink.bootstrap

You'll be prompted for the camera's host/IP, admin username, and admin password. It connects once to query the camera's current settings and its own configured name, then prompts for Camera Name with that name pre-filled — press Enter to accept it, or type a different one. The secret config key isn't prompted for; it's derived automatically from the name (e.g. front-doorbell-password).

The tool appends an entry to cameras.yaml in the current directory and prints the command to store the password securely:

pulumi config set --secret front-doorbell-password "<password>"

The plaintext password is only held in memory long enough to connect and print that command — it is never written to cameras.yaml or to disk.

2. Load cameras in your Pulumi program

import pulumi
import yaml
from pulumi_reolink import ReolinkDevice

config = pulumi.Config()
with open("cameras.yaml") as f:
    cameras = yaml.safe_load(f)["cameras"]

for camera in cameras:
    ReolinkDevice(
        camera["name"],
        host=camera["host"],
        username=camera["username"],
        password=config.require_secret(camera["password_key"]),
        settings=camera.get("settings", {}),
    )

See example/ for a complete, runnable Pulumi project built this way.

3. Preview and deploy

pulumi preview
pulumi up

4. Detect and correct drift

If a setting was changed out-of-band (e.g. via the Reolink phone/desktop app), refresh Pulumi's state and re-apply your desired configuration:

pulumi refresh
pulumi up

Limitations & Out-of-Scope Configurations

To prevent network lockouts and state desynchronization, the following must be managed out-of-band, not through this provider:

• Initial network onboarding — join factory-reset/new cameras to your network and set their initial admin credentials with the official Reolink app first.
• Active network settings — changing the Wi-Fi SSID, Wi-Fi password, or subnet configuration via Pulumi is not supported; it can drop the camera's connection mid-transaction.
• Admin password rotation — rotate admin passwords out-of-band; a failed in-band rotation risks locking the provider out of the device.
• Firmware updates — flashing firmware is a long-running, connectivity-disrupting operation and is not supported.
• Battery-powered cameras (e.g. the Argus series) — these sleep to conserve power and disable their local HTTP API. Only plugged-in (PoE or DC-powered) cameras and doorbells are supported.

FAQ

Does this require Home Assistant? No — it connects directly to your camera over its local HTTP API via reolink-aio, the same library Home Assistant's integration uses, but entirely standalone.

Why not use Pulumi's generic REST API provider? Reolink's API is a single POST /cgi-bin/api.cgi RPC endpoint with stateful session-token authentication — a Login command returns a token that must be appended to every subsequent request, then a Logout command releases it — not RESTful resource paths. A generic REST provider has no way to model that session lifecycle, so this uses a custom Pulumi Dynamic Provider instead.

Does this support NVRs or multiple cameras behind one host? Not yet. Each ReolinkDevice manages a single camera (channel 0); multi-channel NVR support is out of scope for now.

Does this work with battery-powered cameras (e.g. the Argus series)? No — they sleep to conserve power and disable their local HTTP API while asleep, so there's nothing to connect to. Only plugged-in (PoE or DC-powered) cameras and doorbells are supported.

Can I change Wi-Fi settings or rotate the admin password through this? No, deliberately. Both carry a real risk of locking the provider out of the device mid-deployment — manage them out-of-band via the Reolink app instead.

What happens if I remove a camera from my Pulumi program? Nothing on the camera itself. delete is a no-op by design — removing a ReolinkDevice from your code stops Pulumi from managing it, but never mutates or resets the physical device.

The same applies at the individual setting level: removing a key from a ReolinkDevice's settings dict (while keeping the resource itself) stops Pulumi from managing that one setting, but leaves its last-applied value in place on the camera rather than reverting it to any prior state.

What happens if a setting is changed outside Pulumi (e.g. via the Reolink app)? Run pulumi refresh to detect the drift, then pulumi up to re-apply your declared configuration.

Which settings can I manage? A stable set of built-in names, plus best-effort support for others via runtime reflection on the connected camera's API. An unknown or model-unsupported setting fails the deployment with a clear error rather than silently doing nothing. The built-in names:

• status_led
• ir_lights
• push_notifications
• recording
• motion_sensitivity
• ptz_guard_enabled
• ftp_recording
• email_notifications
• hdr
• daynight_mode
• audio_recording
• privacy_mask
• buzzer
• speaker_volume
• ai_animal_sensitivity
• ai_person_sensitivity
• baby_cry_sensitivity
• auto_tracking
• guard_return_time
• privacy_mode
• siren_on_event
• zoom
• focus
• ai_vehicle_sensitivity
• doorbell_quick_reply_message (audio file id to auto-play on a visitor press; -1 turns it off)
• doorbell_quick_reply_time
• doorbell_button_sound
• doorbell_led

Is this affiliated with or endorsed by Reolink? No — this is an independent, community project built on Reolink's local HTTP API, not an official Reolink product.

Development Environment

Nix Shell

Activate the Nix developer shell to load project tools: Python, uv, pulumi, just, git, and gh. It also runs uv sync and activates the resulting .venv, so pulumi_reolink, pulumi, and pyyaml are immediately importable. example/ relies on this shell's environment rather than managing its own dependencies:

nix-shell

Task Runner (Justfile)

• just: List all available tasks.
• just format: Format code with ruff format.
• just lint: Lint code with ruff check.
• just typecheck: Type-check pulumi_reolink with mypy.
• just test: Run the unit test suite with coverage enforcement (pytest --cov-fail-under=90).
• just validate: Run the full pipeline (format check, lint, type check, tests).