Home Assistant

Home Assistant is an open source home automation server. It has integrations for a wide variety of devices, and allows you to create custom dashboards for viewing sensor information and controlling your devices. If you want to access your Home Assistant instance from anywhere, Bare but cannot port forward due to CGNATNetwork Address Translation performed at the level of the ISP's equipment. , making your instance publicly accessible via 44Net is one solution. Even if your home internet isn't behind CGNAT, it likely has a dynamic IP, which would require you to set up dynamic DNS for your instance to maintain consistent external access. A 44Net IP lets your instance be publicly accessible at a fixed IPv4 address for free.

Prerequisites:

• A Home Assistant instance (set this up before exposing it to the internet so that setup cannot be hijacked)
• A 44Net Connect account

Step 1: Set up your tunnel

Home Assistant OS is designed to operate less like a general purpose computing device and more like an appliance. There is no package manager with which to install higher level firewall tools, and the Home Assistant WireGuard application is unmaintained as of 2026. If you're setting up a fresh Home Assistant installation for the express purpose of exposing it to 44Net, the easiest option is running it as a docker container on a device with a single device tunnel. If you have a dedicated Home Assistant appliance, such as a Home Assistant Green or a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant OS on Bare metalRunning an operating system directly on physical hardware, with no hypervisor or virtualization layer in between. , the recommended configuration is to put it on a routed subnet.

For fresh installations using a single device tunnel, it's recommended to configure WireGuard as a split tunnel by setting AllowedIPs to 44.0.0.0/9, 44.128.0.0/10. This puts

Step 2: Open port

Now that your Home Assistant instance and 44Net Connect tunnel are set up, it's time to open the required port in your firewall to make Home Assistant publicly accessible. The default Home Assistant port is 8123, so unless you've changed it, you'll need to open 8123/tcp in your firewall. If you're running a single device tunnel with a Home Assistant VM or docker container, it's as simple as opening the device's firewall on 8123/tcp. If you have a Home Assistant appliance inside a routed subnet, you'll need to open the port in the router's firewall, and ensure the firewall's rule set allows WANWide Area Network devices to initiate connections on that port.