Over the past few days, I've been working on a little Home Assistant add-on that allows distributing the building of ESPHome firmwares over multiple machines. This is not something most people need, but as someone with 50+ ESPHome devices deployed and typical "Upgrade All" compile times over an hour on my HA box, I wanted to build this for my own use.

I've gotten some good feedback on the ESPHome Discord and figured I'd post it here for people to try out.

  [https://github.com/weirded/distributed-esphome](https://github.com/weirded/distributed-esphome)

**How it works:** Install the add-on on your HA instance. It serves a web UI (via the HA sidebar) and coordinates a job queue. You spin up lightweight Docker workers on any machine with spare CPU — a gaming PC, a NAS, a Mac, even a Proxmox VM — and they poll the server for compile jobs. Workers compile firmware and push it directly to your devices via OTA.

**What makes it interesting:**

* **Smart job scheduling** — Workers report CPU benchmarks and real-time CPU utilization. The scheduler uses an effective performance score (benchmark × idle %) to route jobs to the best available machine. Single jobs go to the fastest worker; batch upgrades spread evenly across all workers first, then the fastest picks up extras as it finishes.
* **Live build logs via WebSocket** — Click on any running job to see the compile output streaming in real-time in an xterm.js terminal, complete with ANSI colors and progress bars. No more waiting for a build to finish to see what happened.
* **Automatic worker updates** — When you update the add-on, all connected workers automatically download the new code and restart themselves. No need to manually update each machine.
* **One-command worker setup** — The web UI has a "Connect Worker" dialog that generates a customized docker run command with all the right environment variables pre-filled. Copy, paste, done
* **Works on any architecture** — Workers run on x86, ARM64 (Apple Silicon, Raspberry Pi 4+), and even Windows via Docker Desktop. The GHCR images are built multi-arch automatically.

Still early, definitely rough edges, but it's been running reliably on my setup with 5 workers across 3 Macs and 2 PCs. Happy to hear feedback or answer questions.

ESPHome Distributed Build App