How to use ngrok to access your raspberry pi from anywhere.

I have posted some blog posts regarding setting up pihole on raspberry-pi, and running selenium based tasks on raspberry-pi.

Check these here in blog posts section.

What was my use case ? 🤷

After putting these tasks as CLI commands on raspberry-pi, I wanted more accessibility for these. Like running these even if I am not in local network (at home).

There are two things that I wanted to access.

1. Pihole web interface that runs on pihole's address at http://192.168.0.X/admin/
2. SSH into pihole device to run the CLI commands that I made for some automations.

Challenges ✨

In many routers these are sections where you can configure remote management or do port-forwarding. But my browser did not have these settings available.

It had a section to configure port-triggering, which is similar to port-forwarding but just inside the WAN network. That meant I can not access these things from mobile network or outside WAN.

Solution ✔️

Because of all these restrictions of my router I decided to use ngrok.

Ngrok is a useful utility to create secure tunnels to locally hosted applications using a reverse proxy. It is a utility to expose any locally hosted application over the web.

Setting up ngrok 🔨

1. log on to your device

$ ssh pi@192.168.0.X

It will prompt for password, Enter password and log into the device.

2. Download ngrok and unzip it.

$ wget https://bin.equinox.io/c/4VmDzA7iaHb/ngrok-stable-linux-arm.tgz

$ tar -xvzf ngrok-stable-linux-arm.tgz

3. Create a ngrok account. Where you will get an authtoken.

$ ./ngrok authtoken YOUR_NGROK_TOKEN

This token removes the 8-hour limit of ngrok tunnel. In free version, you get 1 tunnel with unique URL to access local app.

Now you are all setup for using ngrok…!!

Using ngrok to access pihole web interface

Use below command to create a tunnel for port 80. On port 80 there is pihole web interface. We will be able to access this from a unique ngrok URL.

$ /home/pi/ngrok/ngrok http 80 --log=stdout > /home/pi/ngrok.log &

Breakdown of command
/home/pi/ngrok/ngrok --> this is absolute location ngrok executable
http --> protocol to make tunnel for
80 --> port number of web app
--log=stdout > /home/pi/ngrok.log --> Log output file
& --> runs ngrok in background mode

Below is snapshot of how you can access web portal via ngrok tunnel.

Using ngrok to ssh into raspberry-pi

Use below command to create a tunnel for port 22. Using port 22 we can ssh into the device. Using unique URL provided by ngrok, we can ssh into raspberry-pi from anywhere.

$ /home/pi/ngrok/ngrok tcp 22 --log=stdout > /home/pi/ngrok.log &

Breakdown of command
/home/pi/ngrok/ngrok --> this is absolute location ngrok executable
tcp --> protocol to make tunnel for
22 --> port number of ssh
--log=stdout > /home/pi/ngrok.log --> Log output file
& --> runs ngrok in background mode.

Any ssh app like putty(Windows) or juiceSSH(mobile) can be used to connect to raspberry-pi

Below is snapshot of how ssh access from juiceSSH.