The first few years I used Home Assistant (HA) I was worried about exposing it to the internet. Because of this, I use a VPN connection from my phone to administrate HA and Live360 as cloud service to track family phones for automation. Some time back, the support for Life360 was deprecated in HA and I were with several possibilities – one of them using the HA companion app and expose my Home Assistant.

After some investigation I decided to go with a CloudFlare solution. Another solution would be to NAT a port in my network on the firewall, but I wasn’t really calm on that. The main difference in short is that in this scenario, the HA installation establish a secure connection to CloudFlare without NAT needed. Here are the steps.

First you need to install this add-on in your HA.

There are two ways of setting it up – Local tunnel or remote tunnel. I prefer remote tunnel. You can also take a look at the always latest documentation here or go straight for the remote tunnel documentation.