app-cloudflared is a Home Assistant app that connects a Home Assistant instance to a domain or subdomain at Cloudflare through a Cloudflare Tunnel, giving self-hosters remote access to their smart-home dashboard without opening any ports on the router.

What it is

app-cloudflared is a Home Assistant app — the packaging format Home Assistant previously called an add-on — published through the unofficial Home Assistant Apps repository (homeassistant-apps/repository). It is written in Shell, released under the MIT License, and its original setup is credited to Tobias Brenner, with the copyright line naming "Unofficial Home Assistant Apps". The topic list is deliberately narrow — addon, app, home-assistant, homeassistant — and the stated purpose is to run Cloudflared, the Cloudflare Tunnel client, inside a Home Assistant installation so that the instance can be reached from outside the local network.

The concrete problem it solves is inbound access. Rather than opening ports on the router and forwarding them to the Home Assistant host, the app connects the instance through a secure tunnel to Cloudflare and serves it on a domain or subdomain managed there. The README notes that "other services" can be exposed alongside Home Assistant, so the tunnel is not confined to the dashboard alone. Two prerequisites are stated plainly: the user has to own a domain name whose DNS entries are handled by Cloudflare, and domains from Freenom no longer work, so a different registrar is required.

Key capabilities

• Establishes a Cloudflare Tunnel between the Home Assistant instance and a domain or subdomain at Cloudflare, exposing it without opening ports on the router.
• Can be combined with Cloudflare Zero Trust to further secure the connection to the instance.
• Ships its own documentation in cloudflared/DOCS.md, linked directly from the README, with additional setup material in the project Wiki.
• Supports the aarch64 and amd64 architectures, as declared by the repository's architecture shields.
• Installs as a Home Assistant app from a custom repository, added via the my.home-assistant.io "Add Repository to HA" badge or the repository link.
• Is built and checked by GitHub Actions CI and carries a production-ready project-stage badge.
• Is actively maintained, with three open issues against roughly 1,579 stars and 92 forks.

Who uses it and how

• Home Assistant households that want remote access to their dashboard but are unwilling to open router ports to get it.
• Users who already run a domain on Cloudflare DNS, since that domain is a prerequisite rather than an optional extra.
• Installations on ARM64 or x86-64 hosts, matching the two architectures the app declares support for.
• Deployments where a second layer of access control is wanted: the README points to Cloudflare Zero Trust as the way to secure the tunnel further.
• Setups that expose more than Home Assistant, because the app is described as connecting Home Assistant and other services through the same tunnel.

Getting started

Installation happens inside Home Assistant: add the unofficial apps repository manually using the provided link or the "Add Repository to HA" button, then install the Cloudflared app from it. A domain with DNS managed at Cloudflare is required before the tunnel can be configured, with the detail held in cloudflared/DOCS.md and the project Wiki.

How it compares

The supplied facts name no paid products that this app replaces and no sibling tunnelling tools, so it stands alone in this registry. Its position is that of a packaging effort: it wraps Cloudflare Tunnel specifically for Home Assistant rather than offering a general-purpose tunnel client, which ties the setup to Cloudflare's DNS and account terms.

When to use it — and when not

Choose it when a Cloudflare-managed domain is already in place and the goal is remote access with no inbound ports and no separate host for the tunnel client. Avoid it if the domain cannot be moved to Cloudflare, if Freenom is the registrar, or if a dependency on a third-party tunnel provider is unacceptable — the README explicitly asks users to comply with the Cloudflare Self-Serve Subscription Agreement. Prospective users should also note that the README is short and defers real setup detail to cloudflared/DOCS.md and the Wiki, and that the app carries unofficial status under the "Unofficial Home Assistant Apps" copyright.