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 or paying for a VPN subscription.

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 on your NAS 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 exposes your home IP. With Rabtly, you don’t need any of that.

What you’ll need

A control plane running somewhere on the internet (a VPS works great)
Rabtly daemon installed on your home machine
Rabtly daemon installed on your travel device (laptop, etc.)

The control plane doesn’t need to be at home — put it on a cheap VPS so it’s always reachable. Your home machine and laptop both connect to the VPS; they never need to accept incoming connections directly.

Steps

Install and start the daemon on your home machine

On your home server or desktop, run the daemon and give it a recognisable name:


sudo rabtly-daemon \
  --server http://your-vps:8080 \
  --name home-server

Set it up as a background service so it reconnects after reboots (see Linux installation).

Install and start the daemon on your travel device

On your laptop, run:


sudo rabtly-daemon \
  --server http://your-vps:8080 \
  --name my-laptop

Note the IP addresses

Open the dashboard → Nodes. You’ll see both devices with their Rabtly 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. a dashboard on port 8080)
# Just open http://100.64.0.1:8080 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 one running the daemon), you can enable subnet routing.

On your home machine, start the daemon with --routes:


sudo rabtly-daemon \
  --server http://your-vps:8080 \
  --name home-server \
  --routes 192.168.1.0/24

Replace 192.168.1.0/24 with your actual home network subnet (check your router’s settings if unsure).

Now from your laptop, 192.168.1.x addresses will route through the tunnel to your home — so you can access your printer, NAS, smart home hub, etc.

Staying connected 24/7

For reliable remote access, make sure the daemon runs as a system service on your home machine so it auto-starts after power cuts or reboots. See the Linux installation guide for systemd instructions.