Vigil is a local-first camera-intelligence runtime for Home Assistant. It is being built as a Frigate replacement for self-hosters who want detections, evidence, corrections, and the reason behind an alert to survive together on their own machine.
Developer preview: the end-to-end core works, but Vigil is not ready to replace a production network video recorder (NVR) yet. There is no published add-on or container release. See What is available now and What is not yet available before trying it.
A Vigil process can read a directly configured RTSP stream, decode real frames, run the local detector, write a detection and a locally decodable evidence clip, and walk that event back through the camera, detector configuration, and reason for watching it.
The current Home Assistant path publishes discovery and detection data through MQTT. It exposes a service device, per-camera devices, a stateful camera-enable switch, a snapshot action, and a correction command path whose durable result is stored in the local Context Graph store.
The local review service lists detections, walks the provenance of one detection, serves snapshots and clips—including byte ranges for video—and records corrections through the same durable write path used by MQTT.
The implemented recognition storage and matching seam can enroll a detection with a name, resolve a
later same-site sighting, keep a below-threshold sighting unknown, and show the matched reference,
score, and enrolling correction in why. Its repository tests use a deterministic content-hash
embedder. Real SigLIP weight delivery and identity-quality acceptance are not yet an operator-ready
preview workflow.
Hardware acceleration is intent, not a label. Native hardware artifacts probe the available decode and detection backends; if the requested backend cannot run, Vigil keeps CPU/software operation alive and reports the actual backend and reason for fallback.
The useful unit in Vigil is not an isolated detection row. The current direct-RTSP path stores a chain like this:
reason to watch the camera
-> detector configuration in force
-> camera and site
-> detection
-> local evidence clip
vigil why <event-id> and vigil why --latest read that chain from the local store rather than
reconstructing it from logs.
See Why Vigil? for the product problem and the promise for the exact line between the working preview and the release target.
There is no supported public install yet. The repository has no GitHub release, published add-on repository, or published container image. Source checkout also depends on sibling Context Graph and ContextDB repositories, so it is a contributor workflow rather than an operator install path.
The first public release adds the tested add-on, container, and local-service instructions here.
Until then, an unversioned build from dev should not be installed over a working NVR.
The public OSS release still needs the following work. These are not present-tense product claims:
- a published, clean-clone Home Assistant add-on and container install;
- ONVIF discovery, Hikvision/NVR estate setup, and durable multi-camera feed identity;
- full multi-subject event recording, zones, masks, object tracking, and local rules/actions;
- continuous recording, snapshots with content controls, retention, deletion, and disk-budget enforcement;
- assured HA event delivery with visible loss accounting;
- the same-origin machinery dashboard, deployment-boundary hardening, and complete first-run configuration;
- the full Frigate configuration translation and migration path.
Until those are complete and validated, “Frigate replacement” describes the product destination, not the readiness of this developer preview.
Vigil OSS is for one self-hosted site at a time. The working direct-camera path writes its evidence and operational memory locally and opens no unrelated outbound connection. The release contract keeps raw camera media on the site by default. Hosted fleet management, cross-site control, managed onboarding, and learning across customers belong to a separate Vigil Enterprise product; they are not hidden dependencies of the OSS runtime.
Read next:
- Why Vigil?
- What Vigil promises
- Product strategy and boundaries
- Getting started — staged separately; do not treat it as an install guide until a public artifact exists
Vigil is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.