Remote-access Guide

remote access home assistant

by Nathanial Harber Published 2 years ago Updated 1 year ago
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How do I log into my Home Assistant remotely?

2:1917:57Home Assistant 101: Setting up Remote Access - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipAccess let's get started adding remote access to home assistant is as simple as opening a port onMoreAccess let's get started adding remote access to home assistant is as simple as opening a port on your network router to allow the outside world to get to your home assistant instance.

How do I make my Home Assistant accessible outside the network?

You can use any free port on your router and forward that to port 8123. A problem with making a port accessible is that some Internet Service Providers only offer dynamic IPs. This can cause you to lose access to Home Assistant while away. You can solve this by using a free Dynamic DNS service like DuckDNS.

Does Home Assistant need port forwarding?

The Trusted SSL certificate by remote authority like Let's Encrypt is only possible with your external IP (duckDNS subdomain or other domain). Correct port forwarding in your router is crucial for this Home Assistant remote access to work – Double, not Triple check it and test it.

How do I access Home Assistant in cloud?

To get started, open Home Assistant, go to the cloud page in the configuration panel. Find the remote box and enable the toggle. The first time you enable it, Home Assistant Cloud will have to generate and validate the certificate. This can take up to 60 seconds.

What is my external URL for Home Assistant?

You can now access your Home Assistant via https://my-home.duckdns.org both internally and externally while having http://192.168.1.4:8123 available to be used as unencrypted endpoint for things like konnected.io .

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.

What is Home Assistant Hacs?

HACS is a integration that gives the user a powerful UI to handle downloads of custom integrations and plugins. Highlights of what HACS can do: Help you discover new custom elements. Help you install (download) new custom elements. Help you keep track of your custom elements.

What is Home Assistant Host?

Home assistant is Home Automation Hub. Or Home Automation Software to be more precise. It's free and open source and fully local alternative to things like HomeBridge and SmartThings. It gives you the power of home automation without the cloud so you won't depend on internet connection or remote servers.

How do I access Duck assistant homed remotely?

Access Remotely Fill in the External URL with your DuckDNS domain URL (e.g., https://myhomeassistant.duckdns.org) and Internal URL with your Raspberry PI IP address. Now restart the Home Assistant.

How do I access my Home Assistant dashboard?

To start, go to the Home Assistant Overview page, click on the three dots at the top right of the screen and select 'Edit Dashboard'. Then click on the blue '+ Add Card' icon at the bottom right and select a card to add.

What is Home Assistant Hacs?

HACS is a integration that gives the user a powerful UI to handle downloads of custom integrations and plugins. Highlights of what HACS can do: Help you discover new custom elements. Help you install (download) new custom elements. Help you keep track of your custom elements.

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.

How to change password on Home Assistant?

Log in your Home Assistant and click on your username in the lower left corner of the screen. Then do the following: Change your password with a password that contains: letters in upper and lower case, digits and special characters. It will be best if you use this password only for your Home Assistant and nowhere else.

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.

Remote access for Home Assistant

Sometimes you want remote access to Home Assistant. Maybe it’s just so you can have a mobile app update your location, or so you can use some integration that requires it, or you want full access to the user interface.

Before you begin

Log on to your router’s admin pages and check the WAN IP. You don’t want to see a value that begins with:

Reverse Proxy (optional)

There are many reasons you may want to use a reverse proxy. Common reasons are that you don’t want to use SSL inside your network, or that you want to limit remote access to only webhooks. If you want more than remote access to the API and webhooks you’ll need to ensure the proxy is configured with websocket support.

Port forwarding

Congratulations on getting this far without throwing your computer out of the window!

Why Home Assistant Doesn't Work Remotely by Default

The reason it's almost impossible for remote functionality to work out of the box is quite technical but can still be understood if we accept certain facts about home networking. First, your average router (which is often a box your Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives you) will be hard at work protecting your network.

Why Using Regular Remote Access Could be Insecure

The reality is that most people trust a product's instructions to provide the best way of achieving their goal. Unfortunately, when it comes to Home Assistant and remote access, the instructions are focused more on ease of use rather than security.

How a Reverse Proxy Fixes All Our Problems

A proxy is a service that hides your identity to internet services by collecting all their customers' connections and routing them through a few IP addresses which belong to the proxy company. As such, a third-party website can no longer tell who exactly is sending this information or where they live.

Prerequisites For Running a Reverse Proxy With Home Assistant

While the proxy helps tremendously, unfortunately, it adds some complexity to the standard process seen here. What exactly you need to do will depend on your setup, but we will assume that you are using the same computer for this as you are for Home Assistant.

Setting up a Reverse Proxy For Home Assistant

We will be using Apache, but you could also use Nginx if you wanted to. The configuration will be done differently, but they are both equally as good for this purpose.

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, ...

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.

Is HA a good system?

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 personally would want an extra layer of security.

Can Home Assistant scan local network?

However, Home Assistant can scan your local network to automatically detect of devices it supports. This is convenient if you have a lot of devices.

What is remote access?

While this may be obvious to some, remote access is the feature that allows users to control their home from outside the local network over the internet. Most commercial hubs simply have a cloud service that accepts your commands and forwards them to your home, but since Home Assistant is the server, there are a few extra steps to take.

How does it work?

The principle is quite simple. It involves "forwarding" a port on your router to the outside world which effectively makes that port open for external traffic to flow in. Then when you use your public IP address, you will be connected to the correct computer within your network.

Before starting checklist

Before you begin, you will need to have a few things on hand. Notably:

Setting it all up

In this section, we are going to perform the actual setup. There are several ways to do the dynamic DNS step, but the port forwarding step should be fairly ubiquitous.

Securing the system

This is critical. When you expose a computer to the outside world, it becomes almost sure that it will be attacked by hackers or bots. Bad actors run bots that attempt to use known exploits on any public IP address they can find, so if your system is vulnerable, you will get hacked.

User accounts

When you start Home Assistant for the first time the owner user account is created. This account has some special privileges and can:

Other authentication techniques

Home Assistant provides several ways to authenticate. See the Auth Providers section.

Troubleshooting

If you’re seeing authentication failures from 127.0.0.1 and you’re using the nmap device tracker, you should exclude the Home Assistant IP from being scanned.

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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…
See more on packetriot.com

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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