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Remote Access

How to reach your Dash from outside your home network. There are three ways, and they differ in effort and in who sits between you and your home. Pick the one that matches how much you want to manage yourself.

Option Effort Who can see your traffic
VPN You set it up once Nobody outside your home
Your own address You run a tunnel or reverse proxy Nobody outside your home
Managed tunnel (Pro) One click Cloudflare, while relaying (see below)

Option 1: VPN

A VPN (WireGuard, Tailscale, or similar) remains the simplest fully private option. Once your device joins the home network through the VPN, Dash is reachable exactly as it is at home: open http://<host>:3123 as usual.

No extra Dash configuration is needed. The VPN handles routing, and nothing about your home is exposed to the internet.

Option 2: Your own address

If you already run your own tunnel or reverse proxy (Cloudflare Tunnel on your own account, Caddy, nginx, Traefik), you can point it at Dash and teach Dash to trust that address:

  1. Set up your tunnel or reverse proxy so your public address (for example https://dash.example.com) forwards to the machine running Dash, port 3123.
  2. In Dash, open Settings → Remote access (household admin only).
  3. Under Your addresses, choose Add address and enter the public URL.
  4. Sign in from outside your home using your GlassHome account or Quick Connect. Signing in with Home Assistant directly is a local-network option; away from home, the sign-in screen guides you to the right choice.

Notes:

  • Addresses on your home network (like http://192.168.1.50:3123) can be added on any plan. A public address requires Pro.
  • Loopback addresses (localhost, 127.0.0.1) are rejected on purpose.
  • The address must actually resolve; a domain that does not exist yet will fail the check.
  • With this option your traffic flows through infrastructure you control. GlassHome is not in the path.

Option 3: Managed tunnel (Pro)

The built-in managed tunnel uses Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) to expose your Dash without port forwarding, a VPN, or your own domain. Enable it from Settings → Remote access; you get an address like my-home.glasshome.cloud that works from anywhere.

The cloudflared process keeps an outbound connection to Cloudflare’s edge, so no incoming ports are ever opened on your network.

What the managed tunnel can and cannot promise

Honesty matters more to us than marketing here. With the managed tunnel, the connection between your device and Cloudflare is encrypted, and so is the connection between Cloudflare and your home. But Cloudflare’s relay decrypts traffic for the moment it passes through, and the glasshome.cloud addresses are operated by GlassHome. In plain terms: while you use the managed tunnel away from home, Cloudflare (and structurally, GlassHome) could technically observe that traffic. We do not log or inspect it, but “we do not” is a weaker promise than “we cannot.”

If you want a setup where nobody outside your home is in the path, use a VPN or your own address; both keep GlassHome out of the loop entirely.

What works while you are away

Remote sessions route everything through your Dash at home, so the dashboard behaves the same as on your couch: live entity updates, controls, and media. Camera snapshots and album art work remotely too; Dash forwards them from Home Assistant itself, so no extra camera configuration is needed.

Troubleshooting

See Troubleshooting for tunnel-related issues.