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2. Access Home Assistant from Outside your Network

Overview

The biggest advantage of Home Assistant is that it is a resource that runs on your local network. But what if you want to control that resource from outside of your home network? In order for this to work, we need to allow access from your Home Assistant hub to communicate through your ISP (internet service provider) to the outside world. This tutorial can help you with that. 

Prerequisites 
  • Access to your router's configuration settings with port forwarding
  • DuckDNS.org account (it's free)
Steps
  1. Login into DuckDNS.
  2. You should see a simple dashboard that allows you to create a new subdomain of "duckdns.org".
  3. Type in a unique subdomain and click "Add Domain".
  4. DuckDNS will automatically detect your current home ip address. If this is incorect then you can use a free website called https://www.whatismyip.com/ to verfiy that DuckDNS has the correct address inputted. 
  5. Login into your router.
  6. Every router is different but there should be a simple configuration called "Port Forwarding" it may be burried in an advanced configuration area.
  7. The key to this configuration is 4 simple pieces of information:
    1. Your ISP public ip addrees (we already have)
    2. The outside world TCP/IP port number (80)
    3. The local ip address of your Home Assistant server (ex. 192.168.1.10)
    4. The local TCP/IP port number of your Home Assistant server (8123)
  8. The goal is to have outside traffic looking for your Home Assistant server from your public ip address -> your router -> Home Assistant server
  9. Save your settings on your router, you may have to reboot your router
  10. All that's left to do is tell Home Assistant that you wanting to listen to a public DNS record. To do this go to your dashboard and click on "Configuration" -> "General" and scroll down to the bottom. Set the following with the configurations above: 
    1. External Address: http://customsubdomain.duckdns.org
    2. Internal Address: http://192.168.1.10:8123
  11. Click "Save" and reboot your server.
  12. Your should now be able to access your Home Assistant hub from outside of your network by going to http://customsubdomain.duckdns.org
Further Reading

 

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