Request: Adding steps for remote access

[PlebeiusGaragicus]

Wonderful guide! Personally I'm trying to figure out how to best provide remote access to my setup and I'd love to see a few options added to this guide.

I understand that it greatly increases the complexity and can also be considered off-topic - but that last mile issue is honestly game-changing.

I use my OpenWebUI setup on both my phone, work and personal computers and can also provide access to friends and family.

My current setup uses Cloudflare tunnels. I limit access using access groups with Cloudflare so they don't even have to remember a username/password - they just get emailed a code and OpenWebUI uses the authenticated headers.

I'd like to expand this setup to not trust Cloudflare, though. I'd like to use a reverse proxy to allow for multiple services to be hosted (in addition to my OpenWebUI). Several I have found have Let'sEncrypt support. I think using Cloudflare for dynamic DNS would be good - but I haven't yet found a definitive guide online and haven't been successful myself in setting this up. My basic Cloudflare tunnel that serves OpenWebUI works, but stepping up to a reverse proxy with multiple services (Comfy UI, my own streamlit app, etc), handing my own E2E encryption and running it all in Docker hasn't been successful.

[varunvasudeva1]

Hey @PlebeiusGaragicus, thank you! Initially, I didn’t really get into it because I felt I’m not nearly experienced with networking enough to be writing about it. Even now, I’m not necessarily a better networking engineer but I do have a pretty good solution running.

I use Tailscale on my server and access it with any other peer on my tailnet with the required info (hostname.random-name.ts.net:port). I also use a Raspberry Pi running Pihole for ad and tracker blocking - Tailscale allows the entire tailnet to be forced to use this DNS. Managing users works great and, aside from minor DNS connectivity issues, it's smooth both as a user and administrator (I also manage friends and family on the tailnet). With that in mind, I want to keep the guide's section open to other options for those that don't want to use Tailscale - I only started using it because ATT Fiber's network is behind a gateway that doesn't play well with PiVPN/Wireguard and Tailscale abstracted away the days of configuration I would have had to work through.

Let me leave this issue open while I draft a networking section - I do agree with you that, while small materially, it has a large impact on how people communicate with their servers outside of their home network. Thanks for opening this up!

[varunvasudeva1]

Hello @PlebeiusGaragicus! Finally managed to get around to this and added a section on Remote Access. It has instructions for Tailscale but I'm still planning to add a vanilla Wireguard version so I think I'll just leave this open till then.

[PlebeiusGaragicus]

So glad to hear!!

I have since started learning Wireguard and it's been working wonderfully for me! Specifically, I have a VPS that is running Caddy reverse proxy which re-directs my subdomains via wireguard to my home lab server.

There are endless ways to accomplish all this which makes it paralyzing to pick one approach and make meaningful progress.