Access your homelab with SSH from the browser with Cloudflare

Published December 29, 20233 min readMarkdown

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🌐 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 📝

Go to your Cloudflare dashboard and click on Zero Trust on the left menu
Click on Access then Applications and then Add an application
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 Configuration

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

SSH

Now click on Add application

Configure Tunnel 🚇

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

Example