How to access Home Assistant from anywhere with ngrok

This guide walks you through setting up Home Assistant with ngrok. This combination lets you access your Home Assistant dashboard over the public internet.

What you’ll need

Docker Desktop and Docker Compose installed.
ngrok installed on your machine.
Basic familiarity with the command line.

This guide walks through setting up Home Assistant in a Docker container from scratch. The same principles apply if you already have a Home Assistant instance set up, or if you set it up using one of their other installation methods.

1. Initial setup

Create a directory called home-assistant and inside it:

Create a Docker Compose file called compose.yaml
Create a directory called config

2. Run Home Assistant in a Docker container

Update compose.yaml:

services:
  homeassistant:
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
      # the first part of this path will be the location of
      # the `/home-assistant/config` directories you created in the last step
      - /Desktop/home-assistant/config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8123:8123
    privileged: true

In your terminal, start a Docker container with this compose.yaml file:

docker compose up -d

Visit localhost:8123 in your browser. You should see your Home Assistant login page.

3. Configure ngrok to expose Home Assistant

Add ngrok to your compose.yaml under the services section:

services:
  ngrok:
    image: ngrok/ngrok:latest
    command:
      - "http"
      - "http://host.docker.internal:8123"
    ports:
      # you can choose different ports here if you want
      - 4041:4041
    environment:
      # find this at https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/your-authtoken
      NGROK_AUTHTOKEN: YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN

In your terminal, restart your Docker container with this compose.yaml file:

docker compose up -d

Visit your ngrok dashboard to see the endpoint URL. If you visit the ngrok URL, you’ll get a 4xx response and see an error log line in your Docker Desktop logs for the Home Assistant container:

ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http.forwarded] A request from a reverse proxy was received from 192.168.65.1, but your HTTP integration is not set-up for reverse proxies

That’s because the Home Assistant configuration still needs to be updated to allow trusted proxies.

4. Allow trusted proxies in Home Assistant

In your /home-assistant/config directory, look for the file called configuration.yaml. By default, it should already have these settings:

# Loads default set of integrations. Do not remove.
default_config:

# Load frontend themes from the themes folder
frontend:
  themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes

automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml

Add this snippet to the bottom:

http:
  use_x_forwarded_for: true
  trusted_proxies:
    # this IP may be different on your network; grab the IP from the error message
    # in your logs
    - 192.168.65.1
    - 127.0.0.1
    - ::1

Restart the Docker container so the updated Home Assistant configuration can take effect. Visit your ngrok endpoint URL to see your Home Assistant instance online.

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How to access Home Assistant from anywhere with ngrok

What you’ll need

1. Initial setup

2. Run Home Assistant in a Docker container

3. Configure ngrok to expose Home Assistant

4. Allow trusted proxies in Home Assistant

​What you’ll need

​1. Initial setup

​2. Run Home Assistant in a Docker container

​3. Configure ngrok to expose Home Assistant

​4. Allow trusted proxies in Home Assistant

What you’ll need

1. Initial setup

2. Run Home Assistant in a Docker container

3. Configure ngrok to expose Home Assistant

4. Allow trusted proxies in Home Assistant