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layout, title, description, date, date_formatted, author, comments, categories, og_image
| layout | title | description | date | date_formatted | author | comments | categories | og_image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| post | Set up encryption using Let's Encrypt | Tutorial how to encrypt your connection with Home Assistant. | 2015-12-12 16:06:00 -0800 | December 13, 2015 | Paulus Schoutsen | true | how-to | /images/supported_brands/letsencrypt.png |
Exposing your Home Assistant instance outside of your network always has been tricky. You have to set up port forwarding on your router and most likely add a dynamic DNS service to work around your ISP changing your IP. After this you would be able to use Home Assistant from anywhere but there is one big red flag: no encryption. This tutorial will take you through the steps to setup a dynamic DNS for your IP and allow trusted encrypted connection to it - for free using Let's Encrypt.
DuckDNS
The first step is to set up DuckDNS. This is a free dynamic DNS service that you can use to get a DuckDNS.org subdomain to point at your house. A dynamic DNS service works by having your home computer tell DuckDNS.org every 5 minutes what its IP is so that DuckDNS can make sure your domain name is set up correctly.
For this example we will assume our domain is hass.duckdns.org.
First step is to acquire and set up our domain name. For this, go to DuckDNS, log in with any of the supported login providers and add a domain. After this check out their installation instructions to finish your installation of DuckDNS. If you're on a Raspberry Pi, see 'Pi' in the category 'Operating Systems'.
Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA). We will use this to acquire a certificate that can be used to encrypted our connection with Home Assistant.
Let's Encrypt will give you a free 90-day certificate if you pass their domain validation challenge. Domains are validated by having certain data be accessible on your domain for Let's Encrypt (they describe it better themselves).
Assuming that your home is behind a router, the first thing to do is to set up port forwarding from your router to your computer that will run Let's Encrypt. For the Let's Encrypt set up we need to forward ports 80 (http connections) and 443 (https connections). This can be set up by accessing your router admin interface (Site with port forwarding instructions per router).
Now you're ready to run Let's Encrypt using their instructions. If you're using Docker, this is all you need to generate the required keys:
sudo mkdir /etc/letsencrypt /var/lib/letsencrypt
sudo docker run -it --rm -p 443:443 -p 80:80 --name letsencrypt \
-v "/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \
-v "/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \
quay.io/letsencrypt/letsencrypt:latest auth
This will generate your certificate in the directory /etc/letsencrypt/live/hass.duckdns.org. As the lifetime is only 90 days, you will have to repeat this every 90 days.
Home Assistant
Before updating the Home Assistant configuration, we have to update the port forwarding at your router config. We can drop the port forwarding for port 80 as we no longer care about unecrypted messages. Update port 443 to forward to port 8123 on the computer that will run Home Assistant.
The final step is to point Home Assistant at the generated certificates.
http:
ssl_certificate: /etc/letsencrypt/live/hass.example.com/fullchain.pem
ssl_key: /etc/letsencrypt/live/hass.example.com/privkey.pem
You can now navigate to https://hass.duckdns.org!