Setting up secure remote access for Home Assistant running in Docker container

I recently made the leap from runing Hassbian on a RPI3 to an Intel NUC where I have Home Assistant running inside a Docker container on Ubuntu 16.04.

I’m completely new to Docker and still learning the basics but so far managed to create a volume for persistent data storage and have the basics of Home Assistant up and running (able to add devices, access locally, make config changes, etc.).

I’m trying to figure out how to setup secure remote access using Let’s Encrypt/Duck DNS so I can access the Home Assistant instance remotely from my phone when I’m not on my home network.

I currently have the Home Assistant container set to use Host network settings. I followed this guide to setup Let’s Encrypt/Duck DNS and now get the following error:

2018-02-17 11:43:59 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.config] Invalid config for [http]: not a file for 
dictionary value @ data['http']['ssl_certificate']. Got '/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.duckdns.org/fullchain.pem'
not a file for dictionary value @ data['http']['ssl_key']. Got   
'/etc/letsencrypt/live/controlhub.duckdns.org/privkey.pem'. (See /config/configuration.yaml, line 43).

Here’s what the config.yaml looks like:

http:
  api_password: !secret http_password
  ssl_certificate: !secret ssl_certificate
  ssl_key: !secret ssl_key
  base_url: !secret base_url

Is this due to some issue where the container volume is trying to access a resource outside the volume on the host or some other issue?

If anyone is facing this issue in the future, just remove SSL cert/key bits from config.yaml

Still haven’t resolved port issues, but that’s being discussed here.

2 Likes