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Bifrost

Bifrost

A self-hosted smart-home hub — control your devices from one web UI, a REST API, and voice.

Bifrost is a self-hosted smart-home control hub. It brings your supported devices — direct integrations plus anything from Home Assistant — under one web dashboard, a REST API, an embedded assistant (MCP) server, and natural-language voice. It aims to keep device connections live and show each device's real state: connections reconnect on their own with backoff, and a read that can't reach a device falls back to cached state rather than failing the request. See Providers for the full list of supported devices.

What it does

  • Rooms are the core abstraction. A Room aggregates any mix of devices — lights, speakers/receivers, switches and plugs — and is the high-level control surface: power the whole room, set brightness across its lights, fan volume/mute out to its media members (each with a per-room loudness offset). Provider-native groupings (e.g. Hue rooms/zones) are mirrored and wrapped into Rooms with one Sync click. Each room can also be given configurable quick-control buttons — one-tap power/volume/brightness over a chosen set of its devices, or a scene — that sit next to its power button on the dashboard.
  • Five device domains, each with its own state shape. Lights (RGB + color-temperature + brightness + dynamic effects), media (receivers, speakers, TVs — power, volume, mute, source/streaming-service, transport, now-playing), power (strictly on/off switches, plugs, fans), virtual remotes (D-pad keys + app launch for TVs and streamers), and read-only sensors (motion, occupancy, contact, light level, temperature, humidity — presence sensors aggregate into per-room occupancy, and sensors, room occupancy, and device power drive automations (motion → lights on, empty for 15 minutes → room off, TV on → movie lighting)) — each modelled separately rather than squeezed into one generic shape. A TV or streamer's volume can be bound to an AV receiver so it controls the right box. Anything else Home Assistant exposes (climate, covers, locks, …) still surfaces as a generic "Other devices" control.
  • Scenes. Save full-state snapshots — each light's color/temperature/effect plus every switch's on/off — and restore them in one tap, scoped to the whole home or a single room.
  • Floor planner. Paint a rough 2D plan of your home (floor tiles + walls), drop devices roughly where they physically are, and bind painted regions to Rooms. The plan doubles as a live dashboard — devices glow with their real color/brightness and open the same controls used everywhere else.
  • Boards. Compose your own dashboards from widgets — room cards, device tiles, groups, buttons, now-playing (with album art), scenes, sensors, weather, clocks — on a fixed-aspect grid that renders identically on any screen. A board can be seeded from a room, run full-screen as a kiosk, and a paired wall tablet can auto-launch one (see Boards).
  • Voice control. Speak commands in natural language; a deterministic grammar handles the common cases instantly, and anything it can't parse falls through to a local LLM that maps it to the same actions (see Voice & assistants).
  • Everything is exposed. A key-authenticated public API and an embedded Model Context Protocol server let external apps and AI assistants drive the whole home.

Providers

Devices are added through providers — Philips Hue (lights + sensors), Govee and LIFX (lights), Onkyo / Integra and Sonos (audio), Smart TV (Sony Bravia — media + remote), and Home Assistant (a high-class integration spanning lights, media, power, remotes, and sensors). Each is added in the UI (Settings → Add Provider) and discovered automatically; IP-addressable ones support a "Scan network" auto-detect. See Providers for the full list, transports, and setup.

New to Bifrost? Start with the Setup guide — install, first-run, adding providers, voice, the wall tablet, and API keys, end to end.

Voice & assistants

Bifrost is driven hands-free by spoken voice — a deterministic grammar (offline, no model) that falls back to an optional LLM and then to Home Assistant Assist, with spoken talk-back — and by AI assistants through the embedded MCP server at /mcp. Everything is optional and degrades gracefully; the models are pluggable and can run fully local. See Voice & assistants for the whole picture and MCP server for the assistant tools.

The public API (/api/v1, Bearer-key, mint keys in Settings → API keys) covers lights, rooms, scenes, media, power, remotes, and sensors — documented in Public API. Devices can be paired to headless clients by scanning a QR code (no key typing).

Install

mkdir bifrost && cd bifrost
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/others-git/bifrost/main/docker-compose.yml
test -f .env || echo "BIFROST_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d

Then open http://<host>:3000. The Setup guide covers this in full — bare-binary builds, all configuration variables, first-run, adding each provider, voice, the wall tablet, and API keys.

Wall-tablet & companion repos

  • bifrost-kiosk — a native Android app that turns a wall-mounted tablet into a hard-locked, always-on Bifrost fixture: a full-screen dashboard plus an offline wake-word voice satellite. Pair it by scanning a QR code. The hub manages it remotely — over-the-air updates, an auto-launched board, and display power saving (scheduled quiet hours + room-presence blanking).
  • bifrost-skills — reusable hardware setup runbooks (starting with the tablet wall-kiosk).

AI usage disclosure

Bifrost is built with heavy use of AI assistance — primarily Claude Code. AI contributed to code, tests, and documentation throughout. Every change is gated by the same CI as any other (cargo fmt, cargo clippy -D warnings, the full test suite, and the frontend build), and AI-assisted commits carry a Co-Authored-By: Claude trailer.

License

MIT