I used DuckDNS with Let’s Encrypt and nginx for what I understand to be secure way to login externally. I can login locally with no issue. When I try to login externally it shows the home assistant logo and appears that it is loading. It even says “Loading Data.” But eventually it times out and says “unable to connect to Home Assistant. Retrying in XX seconds.” Or it just keeps on with the buffering circle saying “Loading Data.”
Also, trying to use Incognito mode does not work. It blocks it completely.
Please help in anyway you can. I would like to get this set up to be able to log in from other places besides when I’m at home and have already spent 8 hours of searching and trying new things to solve this.
Not sure where nginx sits in your setup, but you have to enable websocket if you do use it as a reverse proxy for HA.
Bottom-line: you are not precise enough in how you opened access to HA ffrom the wide world. DuckDNS + letsencrypt will just forward a domain name to your router and enable SSL on HA.
@koying thank you for the reply. Forgive me but I’m new to all this. I did find one comment buried deep in a forum about enabling websocket but that was it. I could not find how or where to do this. I did a brief search and could not find anything as far as how to do it. Just some people suggesting that it be done. Can you provide any guidance as to how to enable websocket?
I wish I knew the answer. I followed the instructions for my router to set up port forward. In the video they just said to put 443. At no time is there ever any terminology that says port forward “from” and “to”. I’m sure I’m showing you how much I don’t know but I’m trying to learn it. But for my router the only options are global port range _____ - ______ ( I entered 443-443) and there is another box for Base Host Port (which the instructions again said to enter 443).
The strange thing is if I enter in the domain I made at duckdns on my iPhone it has no problems loading the page and will let me log in. It doesn’t load any of my cameras but I can go to file editor and navigate through all the menus.
@koying
Update: Earlier today, about 8 hours ago, I was able to log in externally. I could see and navigate fine. The only issue was some of my cameras were slow to load the stream or did not load the stream at all. Now, as of 5 minutes ago, it will no longer let me in and is back to saying “Loading Data” with a constant spinner buffering wheel.
My next wild guess would be that the duckdns addon does not (or cannot) properly update your external IP address. That could explain why it sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t
