Tutorial: Remote Access to Your Home

This tutorial shows you how to securely access your home network from anywhere — without opening ports on your router.

Time: 15 minutes Difficulty: beginner

The scenario

You have a NAS, home server, or desktop at home. You want to:

SSH into it from work
Access files from a café
Use a service running on your home network (media server, smart home hub, etc.)

Normally this requires port forwarding on your router, which is complex and risky. With Rabtly, you don’t need any of that.

What you’ll need

A Rabtly account at app.rabtly.cloud
Rabtly installed on your home machine
Rabtly installed on your travel device (laptop, etc.)
An enrollment token from Settings → Access Tokens in the dashboard

Steps

Connect your home machine

On your home server or desktop, install and connect Rabtly:


curl -fsSL https://dl.rabtly.cloud/install.sh | sh
rabtly login
sudo rabtly up --token enrt_...

Set it up to start at boot so it reconnects automatically after reboots:


sudo rabtly service install

Connect your travel device

On your laptop, do the same:


curl -fsSL https://dl.rabtly.cloud/install.sh | sh
rabtly login
sudo rabtly up --token enrt_...

Note the IP addresses

Open the dashboard → Devices. You’ll see both devices with their private IPs, for example:

home-server → 100.64.0.1
my-laptop → 100.64.0.2

Access your home machine from anywhere

From your laptop, you can now reach your home server directly:


# SSH
ssh user@100.64.0.1
 
# Copy files
scp user@100.64.0.1:/path/to/file ./local-copy
 
# Access a web service running at home (e.g. on port 8096)
# Just open http://100.64.0.1:8096 in your browser

This works whether you’re at work, a café, a hotel — anywhere with internet.

Access your whole home network (subnet routing)

If you want to reach any device on your home network — not just the machine running Rabtly — enable subnet routing.

On your home machine, reconnect with the --advertise-routes flag:


sudo rabtly up --token enrt_... --advertise-routes 192.168.1.0/24

Replace 192.168.1.0/24 with your actual home subnet (check your router settings if unsure). You can advertise several subnets at once with a comma-separated list: --advertise-routes 192.168.1.0/24,192.168.2.0/24.

The routes are saved to the daemon’s config, so a device running as a system service keeps advertising them across reboots — you don’t need to pass the flag again. To stop advertising, reconnect with an empty value: sudo rabtly up --advertise-routes "".

Now 192.168.1.x addresses route through the tunnel to your home — so you can access your printer, smart TV, NAS, and anything else on your network.

Staying connected 24/7

Make sure the daemon runs as a system service on your home machine so it starts automatically after power cuts or reboots. Run sudo rabtly service install once and you’re set.