The EASIEST VPN for Home Assistant - Tailscale Install

i've covered how to set up remote access to home assistant twice in the past once using a traditional port forwarding method and another time by setting up a wire guard vpn both are very valuable options but for lots of you out there these solutions will not work because your isp makes it impossible for you to port forward but today i have the solution for you and it's called tail scale which requires no port forwarding works on pretty much every device and it's easy ridiculously easy if you haven't heard of tailscale before tailskill is billed as a zero config vpn that just works allowing you to easily connect servers computers and phones in literally just a matter of minutes you don't need any experience creating vpns networking port forwarding firewall rules or any of that to get tail scale up and running and it's all completely 100 free now as mentioned we have covered two other methods of remote access in the past both the port forwarding method and a creating your own vpn using wireguard method and both definitely have their own pros and cons but i do also want to mention nabu casa of course which is an also an excellent option and definitely one you should be considering it's just five dollars per month massively helps support the home assistant project and of course gives you simple remote access and also allows you to easily connect to google assistant and a-l-e-x-a even if you don't plan to use the remote access portion of nabucassa please consider supporting the project getting back to tail scale let's very briefly talk about some of the pros and cons obviously as mentioned already tail scale is incredibly simple and easy to get started with and it's also very lightweight and fast because tail scale is actually built on top of wire guard which is what we used in our vpn video finally a major advantage that tail scale has is that it can help you to bypass a cg nat or a double knot scenario where port forwarding isn't an option for you then tail scale could be the solution that you have been waiting for and really is a godsend for people in that situation however if you were hoping to do this and connect to google home or al exa then this isn't unfortunately the option you were looking for but otherwise tail scale is a very great solution let's jump right into the install and head over into your home assistant and into supervisor then add-on store and find the tail scale add-on this add-on was recently made possible by the one and only frank so make sure to show him some support hit the install button and then let the add-on install and then you're going to want to check the start on boot watchdog and auto update options and then hit the start button wait for a couple of seconds and then open the tail scale ui at which point you will be asked to log into tail with either a github microsoft or google account once you've done that and given access then you can refresh the page and it should say that you are now connected next head over to login.tailscale.com and once again sign in with the same email account that you just used you will then see a list of all your currently configured devices including our home assistant server that we just added what you can then do is hit the options button and then click review route settings inside here you can then tick the subnet route options what this will do is allow you to access all other ips on that subnet through the tail scale connected device or in this case our home assistant server all that's left to do now is to install the client on our device and tailscale has clients for pretty much every device out there but i'll go ahead and show you how to add it to your phone go over to the app store or play store and download the tail scale app you will then need to log in again with the same account as before and then you will probably need to accept prompts for using a vpn then you will see a list of all your connected devices including your home assistant server and up at the top left will be a button to connect or disconnect and that is pretty much it from here you can go ahead and disconnect your phone from your home wi-fi connect to the vpn and try to access the ip address of your home assistant server and if successful it should open the page right up one other option that you should be aware of is that back on the tail scale website you can head over into the dns section and this is where you can configure a dns server and for example if you use adguard or some other dns server then you can benefit from using that dns server and you can configure that in the dns section here and that is really all there is to it if you have any other devices you want to connect you will want to go ahead and install the tail scale app on your device but other than that you are pretty much good to go it really is that simple it's actually kind of amazing to see how far vpn technologies have come i've been configuring vpns for quite a long time now at scale but i've never seen anything quite like this in terms of simplicity setting up vpns of old used to require praying to the vpn gods and sacrificing a few of your children but tailskill makes it so that pretty much anyone can do it so it's actually debating whether or not this even required a video since it really is so simple to do but then i thought that a lot of you wouldn't even be aware that this solution existed and it only actually recently came onto the add-on store in home assistant and so i thought i would try and do this video and make you all aware that this solution now exists and is so easy to use but that's about going to do it for this video hopefully you find it useful any questions comments queries concerns drop them in the comments box down below or just come and say hi it does massively help me out with the youtube algorithm if you want to support the channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is massively appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 12,407

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant vpn, home assistant remote access, tailscale, tailscale install, home assistant tailscale, vpn, best vpn, virtual private network, home assistant setup, home assistant guide, smart home, home assistant remote, home assistant tailscale install, tailscale setup, home assistant tailscale setup

Id: 5rFWcukwCzU

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021