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LocalSky

Hyperlocal weather on your hardware. Smart irrigation when you want it.

LocalSky is two products in one Docker container.

A self-hosted weather dashboard that reads your Tempest or Ecowitt station over the LAN, merges Open-Meteo and NWS forecasts with per-field provenance, and renders the result in a fast installable PWA with built-in NEXRAD radar and lightning. Useful on its own, even if you never irrigate anything.

A smart irrigation engine that pairs the same weather data with peer-reviewed agronomy (FAO-56 reference ET, USDA soil textures, species-aware Kc curves, a 17-rule skip ladder) and drives OpenSprinkler, ESPHome, or Home Assistant. Optional. Off until you wire a controller.

This site is the operator’s manual. The dashboard, settings UI, and first-run wizard are designed to keep you out of YAML and out of the terminal for day-to-day use. The chapters here exist for when you want to understand exactly what the engine is doing, swap a sensor source, calibrate a zone, or wire LocalSky into the rest of your stack.

Where to start

  • New install: jump to Quick start for the docker run and the first-run wizard walkthrough.
  • Weather-only user: the wizard’s “Controllers” step accepts an empty list. The irrigation surfaces disappear and LocalSky runs as a pure weather product.
  • No Home Assistant: Standalone mode covers sensors via MQTT, Ecowitt LAN, and HTTP webhooks.
  • Existing HA user: Home Assistant integration covers the outbound MQTT discovery path and the legacy Smart Irrigation + Irrigation Unlimited passthrough.

Where things live

What you want to knowChapter
What weather sources LocalSky can readSensors
How the engine decides whether to waterIrrigation engine + Skip rules
Which grass species the catalog supportsGrass species catalog
Which soil textures the catalog supportsSoil texture catalog
Which controllers LocalSky drivesControllers
Every config optionConfiguration reference
Every REST + SSE endpointREST + SSE API
How the UI is supposed to feelUX journey
Upgrade from v0.1Migration from v0.1

Two ways to run it

LocalSky is designed to work well in either configuration:

  • Standalone: a self-contained service that talks directly to your weather sensors (and optionally to your irrigation controller). Add sensors over MQTT, Ecowitt LAN POST, or HTTP webhooks.
  • Alongside Home Assistant: an outbound MQTT discovery publisher auto-creates sensor.localsky_* entities in HA. A passthrough adapter is also available for existing Smart Irrigation + Irrigation Unlimited setups.

Both modes are first-class. Pick the one that fits your stack.

Everything runs on your own hardware. Open-Meteo is the only optional outbound call, and it can be swapped for NWS or any other compatible forecast source.