🌐 Access your homelab with SSH from the browser with Cloudflare

Introduction 📜

This is a guide on how to access your homelab with SSH from the browser with Cloudflare. This is useful if you want to access your homelab from a computer where you can't install an SSH client, like a Chromebook or a computer where you don't have admin rights.

Guide from docs

Prerequisites 📋

• Have a Cloudflare account 🌩️
• Having a server running with cloudflared installed you can follow this guide

Steps 📝

1. Go to your Cloudflare dashboard and click on Zero Trust on the left menu
2. Click on Access then Applications and then Add an application
3. Select Self-hosted

Application Configuration 🛠️

• Application name: you can put whatever you want, for example, SSH-Blog
• Session duration: you can put also whatever you want, for example 24 hours (I'll suggest you put a short duration for security reasons)
• Application domain: Put the domain you want to use, for example, ssh-blog.example.com

Application Appearance 🎨

• Up to you; you can put whatever you want

Tags 🏷️

• Up to you; you can put whatever you want

Block Pages 🚫

• I'll usually do something like this

Identity Providers 🔑

• I'll suggest you use at least 1 for this kind of application; you can choose whatever fits you better. For my case, I'm using One-Time PIN and GitHub.

• Click on Next

• Policy name + Allow + Session duration
• Assign a group (create one if you don't have any)

In my case, the group I'm using is a list of emails, so only people with those emails can access the application.

Create Additional Rules (Optional)

• Only necessary if your groups don't contain any rule or you want to add more rules.

Additional Settings 🛠️

• I'll leave this by default

• Click on Next

Setup 🛠️

CORS Settings 🛠️

• I'll leave this by default

Cookies Settings 🍪

• I'll leave this by default

Additional Settings 🛠️

• Here is one important thing: you need to select under Browser rendering the option SSH

1. Now click on Add application

Configure Tunnel 🚇

1. Go into Access then Tunnels and select your tunnel then Configure
2. Select Public Hostname then Add a public hostname
3. Use the same domain you used in the application configuration, for example, ssh-blog.example.com
4. Service type: SSH
5. URL: localhost:22

Conclusion 📝

Now you can access your homelab with SSH from the browser with Cloudflare. You can access it by going to ssh-blog.example.com and you'll see something like this: