How to Setup Home Assistant Remote Access using a Cloudflare Tunnel

[@michaelsleen]

👉 Let me know what you’re using to log-in to Home Assistant remotely.

[@mihaicristian4079]

Thanks!

[@NeilHughes-d5c]

Just done this and it worked great. I understand the need to change the Home Assistant URL but not sure why you say to also change the Local Network to my Cloudflare provided address since this will never be accessed externally.

[@michaelsleen]

Fair point, and glad it's working well for you!

[@thomasvdalen]

+add If you had portforwarding alreadt set up, remove that forwarding form your router! Thats where i got stuck for hours of trying

[@michaelsleen]

Yes, you should disable or remove them. Thanks for sharing!

[@atifsattar6151]

A question: I've completed my setup and it's now accessible from outside, but this opens it up to anyone externally to hack into my device if I'm not mistaken? Thinking of how I can setup either 2FA or enhance security into the device, I guess a VPN could have been an option. I'm also debating an exploring of using Cloud-Flare Zero Trust. Let me know your thoughts.

[@michaelsleen]

You can enable multi-factor authentication for your Home Assistant log-in, which you absolutely should do regardless. Additionally, you could go the Zero Trust route with mTLS rules. However, I've seen a variety of experiences on how to set up Zero Trust and mTLS in a way that ensures things continue to work smoothly. There are additional hurdles for iOS users as it relates to client certificates (seems a bit easier on Android). It's an area to spend some time researching before implementing.

[@jonl7p]

Im using port forwarding currently. Was considering a cloudflare tunnel so thanks for the video. I use unify with a dynamic ip, would i need to worry about updating the cloudflare dns when my dynamic ip changes? Or does having the cloudflare tunnel esrablished mean that traffic can be received and there is no need to worry about ddns anymore ?

[@michaelsleen]

You should not need to keep your Dynamic DNS entry if all you were using it for is remote access. Cloudflared communicates from your Home Assistant to Cloudflare and sorts out the required IP.

[@nyeinchanlu7906]

I did the same and have some issue. I can't access sometime on a certain browser. But other browser works. and the weird thing is when i can access from other browser, the other browser suddenly can access somehow. what is going on ? please advise ? and i see ssl certificate and key lines in your config. do you need that ?

[@michaelsleen]

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. The walkthrough I provided in the video demonstrated all the steps I took to enable a Cloudflare Tunnel for remotely accessing my Home Assistant server. I'm not entirely sure why it would work in one browser and not another, but you can try clearing the cache.

[@JosueAlejandroFerret]

I'm on the latest version of Home Assistant, I dont see where to edit the configuration file.

[@michaelsleen]

I suggest installing the Studio Code Server add on if you haven’t already, and checking the option to show it in the sidebar since you’ll likely go to it often. When you open Studio Code Server, you can find the configuration.yaml file.

[@JosueAlejandroFerret]

@ thanks Michael!

[@TobyMole]

Ive just done this. Worked well except for a few mniutes where my borwser told me that it could not reach my domain...it started working by itself after that however. As my domain was brand new I assume (hope) this was due to DNS propogation time.

[@michaelsleen]

Glad it seems to be working for you!

[@gambler3k]

well, i can access my domain on my phone with mobile internet but when using the domain name on internal network it dosnt work, cant figure out why

[@michaelsleen]

I do not have this issue. You could try using the IP address of your Home Assistant server or homeassistant.local:8123/ on the internal network and see if that works.

[@JawadRSD]

Did you fix this? I am currently stuck aswell

[@OmriZion]

Working great, thanks

[@michaelsleen]

Great to hear!