Remote-access Guide

homeassistant remote access checklist

by Laura Altenwerth Published 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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How do I secure my Home Assistant for remote access?

If you want secure remote access, the easiest option is to use Home Assistant cloud by which you also support the founders of Home Assistant. Another option is to use TLS/SSL via the add-on Duck DNS integrating Let's Encrypt. To expose your instance to the internet, use a VPN, or an SSH tunnel.

Is it safe to port forward Home Assistant?

Just putting a port up is not secure. You should definitely consider encrypting your traffic if you are accessing your Home Assistant installation remotely.

How do I find a Home Assistant outside my house?

13:3817:57Home Assistant 101: Setting up Remote Access - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipStore but in ssl cert only allows the communication. Between home assistant. And an outside deviceMoreStore but in ssl cert only allows the communication. Between home assistant. And an outside device to remain private it doesn't prevent someone from trying multiple passwords.

Can you expose Home Assistant on the internet?

There's always some risk. Having said that the last known exploit was patched very quickly by home assistant. So the risk is pretty small if you keep Home Assistant up to date and keep up to date with Home Assistant news.

Why is port 443 secure?

HTTPS is secure and is on port 443, while HTTP is unsecured and available on port 80. Information that travels on the port 443 is encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or its new version, Transport Layer Security (TLS) and hence safer.

How do I setup a static IP for Home Assistant?

0:241:47Assign Static IP to Home Assistant - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipThen on the top of the screen i click on system tab in host section you can find the current ipMoreThen on the top of the screen i click on system tab in host section you can find the current ip address of your device by clicking on change this window pops up i select ipv4.

Is Nabu Casa worth it?

Nabu Casa provides good value for money with features like access to smart home from everyone, text to speech technology and one click connection to voice assistants (Alexa, Google). All of this can be achieved without Nabu Casa by the technically inclined with some degree of work.

Is Home Assistant cloud free?

Well good news, because you can trial Home Assistant cloud for free for one month. In a few easy steps you can set-up your trial: From the Home Assistant user interface go to Settings, and then go to Home Assistant cloud. Click on the Start your free 1 month trial.

How do I access Home Assistant via browser?

Add Home Assistant as an app on your phone Open your phone browser and navigate to the public IP for dynamic DNS of your installation. Open your browser setting menu and find “Add to home screen” you can now give it name. From now on you can now access your Home Assistant installation directly from your home screen.

Is Home Assistant cloud secure?

As a user, the only configuration step that you need is to enable it from the cloud configuration panel. Once enabled, Home Assistant will generate a security certificate for secure communication and provide you with a url that is accessible while away from home.

How do I run https Home Assistant?

9:5813:10Getting started with Home Assistant - 2021 - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipHead on store search for visual studio. Code click on it and then install. It. To easily access theMoreHead on store search for visual studio. Code click on it and then install. It. To easily access the add-on you can toggle the option show in sidebar. Start the add-on. Then click on open web ui.

Can Home Assistant work without internet?

is there anyway to use home assistant os without an internet connection?! i didn't find anything recent. As long as your local network stays up and your integrations don't depend on an external service you should be able to continue to use it.

Do I need to port forward Home Assistant?

Beginner's Guide to Home Assistant • JuanMTech As explained, it does require port-forwarding. If that's not something you want to do then you can, as explained, subscribe to Nabu Casa or use something like ZeroTier (not the same as what Nabu Casa offers but does allow for remote-access without port-forwarding).

What ports does Home Assistant use?

The basics: How the app talks to your Home Assistant​ 1.4 and listening on port 8123. If you use Home Assistant OS and haven't changed any of the defaults, Home Assistant will also be reachable at http://homeassistant.local:8123.

How do I access my home network without port forwarding?

1:1918:14Access Your Self Hosted Services WITHOUT Port Forwarding - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipAccount um they're free you can just go to cloudflare.com. Sign up for one. And that's basically allMoreAccount um they're free you can just go to cloudflare.com. Sign up for one. And that's basically all you need to do there. And then you'll need to actually point your domain.

How do you use Duckdns at Home Assistant?

Go to www.duckdns.org and logon using your preferred credential method. Once you logged on, add a domain and take note the token information. We will be using this token to configure the DuckDNS in Home Assistant. Also take note the domain information you created (e.g., https://myhomeassistant.duckdns.org).

Checklist

Here’s the summary of what you must do to secure your Home Assistant system:

Remote Access

If you want secure remote access, the easiest option is to use Home Assistant cloud by which you also support the founders of Home Assistant.

Extras for manual installations

As well as the above we advise that you consider the following to improve security:

How often can Home Assistant update Cloudflare?

Home Assistant can run a check every hour for changes, and update Cloudflare if your IP changes. Paste the following into your configuration.yaml file. Your zone should be your domain, and the records will be any subdomains you wish to update. Use the same Global API Key that was used above.

What to do if your IP address matches your home IP address?

If the IP address responding matches your home IP address, double check your Cloudflare settings and make sure that the proxy status is correct.

How to edit yaml file in Home Assistant?

To edit your configuration.yaml file in Home Assistant, you need to have their File Editor plug-in installed. Click on Supervisor in the left hand menu. Click Add-on store, and then click on File Editor. Click Install and wait for the installation to complete. Once the installation is complete, ...

Can you turn on multifactor authentication in Home Assistant?

You should also turn on multi-factor authentication within Home Assistant. This can be configured in the profile section of your account.

What is home assistant?

Home Assistant is a free and open-source system for home automation and allows you to view the status and control various IoT and smart devices in your home. Once Home Assistant is setup it will scan your network for devices and identify them. You can setup credentials for these devices and with the help of a plugin for the device, ...

Why is the HA prompt displayed?

This prompt will be displayed if the mobile app isn’t able to detected to the HA instance automatically on your network, however, you want to manually input a URL to your HA instance so this way you can access it remotely when you’re not on your LAN.

Does HA have plugins?

HA has a very expansive eco-system of plugins and opportunities to customize. They have a great community so I would check them out. The help page on the HA website has more resources as well.

Does a HA container need to be on the same network as the host?

This means that the container for HA needs to be on the same network as the host. This also implies that the Packetriot tunnel (client) needs to be on the host network since it would otherwise be isolated from communicating to the host running the HA container.

Do you have to authenticate before using Home Assistant?

A user would have to authenticate here first before any traffic is even proxied to the Home Assistant service . This means that any automated traffic would just get dropped.

Can you set location on Home Assistant?

Once you create your user will be able to set or confirm a location for your home and make a few other small customizations. Finally, you’ll be presented the dashboard for Home Assistant.

Can you control lights with Home Assistant?

You can setup credentials for these devices and with the help of a plugin for the device , it can be controlled and automated through Home Assistant’s web dashboard. You can control lights, thermostats, robot vacuum cleaners and many more devices. Home Assistant.

What port is Home Assistant on?

You just have to open port 443 in your router and forward it to your local Home Assistant IP on port 8123 . You also have to assign a static IP address for the server where your Home Assistant is installed. If you don’t know how to do that just ask in the comments section below or search in Google.

Where is my username on Home Assistant?

Log in your Home Assistant and click on your username in the lower left corner of the screen.

How many pages are there in Smart Home?

28 unique printable pages in a Smart Home Getting Started Actionable Guide designed to help you make the best decisions and your Home Smart right away!

What IP address to forward to Home Assistant?

This is what you aim! Just replace the Forward IP – 10.0.0.2 with your Home Assistant local address and you are good to go.

Does Home Assistant have a warning?

That means – you will receive warnings from your browser when you access the https version of your local Home Assistant. Depending of the browser that you are using you may add your local Home Assistant https address as exclusion once and you will not receive any warnings after that.

HACS

Once you have installed the HACS, home assistant community store, go to frontend, add repositories, search for LG Web OS Remote Control and add it in.

Adding LG TV into home assistant

Go to configuration.yaml and add the code below, replace the host with the IP address of your LG TV (good idea to keep it on a fixed IP). MAC address is also unique and you will find it with the IP address on your router.

Dashboard

Below I created a little grid card with mini-media-player and custom:lg-remote-control

What is home assistant?

Home Assistant grants access to your home, such as turning on and off lights and applicances, watching camera feed, and even opening locks. You want to ensure the access is verified and authenticated. This goes both ways: the Home Assistant server must verify the client identity and the client must verify the server. This requires a strong password and potentially two-factor authentication for your Home Assistant user and a valid certificate for your domain.

Does Home Assistant block HTTP requests?

Starting from version 2021.7, Home Assistant will block HTTP requests when a misconfigured reverse proxy, or misconfigured Home Assistant instance when using a reverse proxy, has been detected. This will result in “400: Bad Request” is returned when accessing Home Assistant.

Can ISP allocate private IP addresses to residential network?

With the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, it is possible that ISP allocates private IP addresses to residential network by putting carrier-grade NAT between your router and the Internet. If your IP obtained from your ISP is a private IP, then you are out of luck unless you contact your ISP to allocate you a public IP.

What happens when a remote instance is lost?

When the connection to the remote instance is lost, all previously published states are removed again from the local state registry.

How to create an access token?

You can generate an access token in the by logging into your remote instance, clicking on your user profile icon, and then selecting "Create Token" under "Long-Lived Access Tokens".

Can you configure a prefix for all remote entities?

You can configure an optional prefix that gets prepended to all remote entities (if unsure, leave this blank).

Default ways to access Home Assistant

Out-of-the-box you are will be accessing your local Home Assistant installation when you are connected yourself to that same local network. The hardware you utilise to run Home Assistant is likely connected to Ethernet or Wi-Fi and not by default reachable outside your own home.

1. Prerequisites

First things first. In this tutorial I will explain how you can access your Home Assistant installation via your own custom domain name using the services of Cloudflare. There will be a new few things I assume you already own or have configured properly as it is not in scope of this tutorial to include instructions:

2. Setting up Cloudflare: add a subdomain

Let’s get started! We should start with setting up Cloudflare properly. The main idea is to create a subdomain (homeassistant.example.com) and ensure it points to your home assistant installation at your home location.

3. Ensure you configure your network to allow port forwarding

We must now ensure that a user who visits https://homeassistant.example.com will be forwarded to your exact HA instance: including the correct port. The port forwarding is important in order to point the user correctly to Home Assistant and no other devices on your network:

4. Configure Home Assistant

Now let’s go to Home Assistant (via the local method still) and ensure it is configured properly to allow for these incoming traffic from the Internet.

5. Manage your dynamic IP address at home

Your IPv4 address at home is possibly a dynamic address: your ISP may change it at any time. It is a good idea to sent the latest IP address of your home network to Cloudflare and update the A record with this new IP address.

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Remotely Access and Control Home Assistant

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Published at December 22, 2020 · 11 min read Home Assistantis a free and open-source system for home automation and allows you to view the status and control various IoT and smart devices in your home. Once Home Assistant is setup it will scan your network for devices and identify them. You can setup credentials for th…
See more on packetriot.com

Setup and Start Containers

  • Below is the compose file we’re going to use. It includes a container called pktriot-tunnel for running and hosting our Packetriot tunnel and another called home-assistantfor running HA. Typically you want to run containers within their own virtual network. This helps isolate them from the host and is good from a security perspective. However, Home Assistant can scan your local …
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Setup Tunnel & Traffic Rules

  • We’re going to configure and setup the traffic rule for the tunnel that will serve our Home Assitant service. In this tutorial we are using a custom domain, so be sure to verifya custom domain you own that you are using to follow along. Change into the containers directory. We’ll use the command docker exec -it to execute a command inside the pktriot container to configure a new …
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Initial Home Assistant Setup

  • We’ll be visiting the URL https://ha.packetdemo.comto access our HA instance. You will be presented with a page from Home Assistant to setup a user and their credentials. Once you create your user will be able to set or confirm a location for your home and make a few other small customizations. Finally, you’ll be presented the dashboard for Home Assistant. Our tutorial ends …
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Companion Apps

  • HA includes support for companion apps on smart phones/tablets and supports iOS and Android. So you can control your smart home from the couch or while you’re away. I’d like to walk through some of the setup for the iOS application so we can review what information needs to be input while setting up a mobile app. Initially you’ll be presented with a view to begin the HA instance c…
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Software Updates

  • With this installation keeping up with software should be easy, this is because all of our application data for all of our containers (Home Assistant, Packetriot) is being stored on the host and not inside the container. Below are commands you can run to refresh all the software for all of the containers.
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Security Improvements

  • I don’t run Home Assistant on my home network, I just haven’t jumped on the smart home bandwagon yet. However, if you’re installing and using smart devices in your home, HA is a very popular system to command and control them, and adds a lot of utility to your home. It can also make it easy to monitor these devices when you’re away from home. That being said, I’d persona…
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Conclusion

  • I’m very impressed with the amount of plugins and devices Home Assistant supports. HA has an pretty awesome community as well. I think if you’re looking at home automation then Home Assistant is the right software to consider setting up and the eco-system is there to support any smart or IoT devices you setup in your home. We did not cover all options and configurations fo…
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