Hey guys, I’d like to set up smart home for myself. I am looking for open source tools without connection to external services. Thanks in advance
Since I am on the same journey as OP and tried it just recently, I have one thing to add about openHAB:
It does not come with actual login credential handling. If you want to make your smart home accessible from outside your home network I cannot recommend openHAB.
I am currently going with Home Aisstant mainly for that reason.
Very good point. HomeAssistant offers a paid service called Nabu Casa that provides you a secure way to access your entire HomeAssistant instance, including cameras, sensors, you can set up mobile push notifications, and more.
Thanks for the hint I did not know about Nabu Casa.
Although I am not clear about the benefit of the service. I thought I could achieve the same kind of access with simply forwarding ports 80 and 443 from my router to my home assistant. Is there anything wrong with my intended setup?
If you want to make your smart home accessible from outside your home network I cannot recommend openHAB.
You can use a VPN instead for this. Which is a good idea in general, in my view, unless you need your resources to be publicly accessible.
Although I agree that even LAN services should ideally have some sort of credentials anyway.
Using a VPN does work for restricting outside access, however I found that for me this was not convenient enough for two reasons:
- I would need to setup a VPN server at my home network
- I would need to connect to my VPN everytime before trying to access my smart home devices
- I would need to setup a VPN server at my home network
I haven’t used it, but most people consider Tailscale to be easy to setup. But of course, what is hard or easy varies from person to person.
- I would need to connect to my VPN everytime before trying to access my smart home devices
You can leave it on all the time and configure it to not route internet traffic through the VPN (if you don’t have the upload bandwidth at home).
