Shelly Cloud DIY – the devices your local integration can't see

Shelly Cloud DIY – the devices your local integration can't see

· 3 min read

  • #Home Assistant
  • #Shelly
  • #Smart Home
  • #HACS

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Almost everyone in the smart-home world knows Shelly: small Wi-Fi relays that switch blinds, lights and sockets. In Home Assistant, the official Shelly integration is the first choice for them – it talks to the devices locally on your own network, fast and offline-capable. For anything reachable on your LAN, it should stay the first choice.

But not every Shelly device is reachable on the LAN.

What a local integration structurally can’t see

Three cases slip through the net – not out of neglect, but because a pure-LAN integration fundamentally cannot see them:

  • Shared devices. If someone has shared a device from their Shelly account with you – a neighbour’s weather station, say, or a device at a holiday home – it simply doesn’t exist for your local network.
  • Cloud-only / remote devices you can only reach through the Shelly cloud.
  • The “Shelly BLU” Bluetooth family, connected to the cloud via a BLU gateway.

This is exactly where Shelly Cloud DIY comes in – as a complement, not a replacement.

The real trick: a key you generate yourself

There is already a cloud route for Shelly in Home Assistant – via the so-called Integrator API. Its catch: you need access that Shelly grants selectively (“licenses for personal use are not provided”). Private users have to apply – and can be turned down.

Shelly Cloud DIY deliberately takes the other path: it uses the cloud auth key you generate yourself in the Shelly app in about two minutes. No application, no waiting, no vendor “yes” required. “DIY” is the whole point – you stay in control.

Local-first: the cloud never gets in the way

The key design principle: for locally controllable devices, the native integration stays in the control path. The cloud is only a visibility overlay – it brings in devices that would otherwise be missing, but it is never a prerequisite for a switch to work. If the cloud goes down, your local device keeps switching. And because this could easily create duplicates, creating the cloud entities is opt-in: you decide per device.

Practical proof that this holds up: shared-device support was tested in practice against a weather station shared from someone else’s Shelly account – it shows up in Home Assistant as ordinary sensor entities, with no access to that other account at all.

From submission to the HACS store

The integration was submitted to the HACS default catalogue on 18 April 2026 and accepted on 22 June 2026 – a good two months of maturing and review in parallel. Since then you can find it in HACS straight from search, without pasting the repo URL by hand.

To stay honest: it’s still young 0.x software, cloud polling is not a real-time bus (it queries every five seconds), some convenience features such as the fleet map are still beta, and the integration is not in Home Assistant Core – it lives as a HACS extension. For its purpose – making visible the devices that would otherwise be missing – that is exactly the right place.

If you have Shelly devices that have been missing from Home Assistant, give it a try – feel free to share this, and let me know which gap the integration closed for you.

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