Dashboard over Tailscale

What you get: the dashboard of the home server setup opens also away from home, on your own devices, through Tailscale. Tailscale is a private network between your devices; nothing is published on the internet. The receiver is not affected.

Time: 15 minutes. You need: the home server setup done, and a free Tailscale account.

1. Install Tailscale on the server (on the server, with ssh):

   curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
   sudo tailscale up

   The second command prints a link. Open it in your browser and log in; the server joins your Tailscale network.

2. Find the server’s Tailscale address:

   tailscale ip -4

   It prints an address starting with 100., for example 100.101.102.103.

3. Install Tailscale on your phone and laptop from tailscale.com/download and log in with the same account.

4. Let the dashboard listen on both networks. In ~/looku/deploy/.env, change:

   LOOKU_DASHBOARD_BIND=0.0.0.0
   LOOKU_API_HOSTS=192.168.1.10:8788,100.101.102.103:8788
   LOOKU_API_ALLOW=192.168.1.0/24,100.64.0.0/10

   In plain words: listen on every network the server has, accept both addresses in the browser, but let in only devices on your home network (192.168.1.0/24, everything starting with 192.168.1.) and on Tailscale (100.64.0.0/10, the range Tailscale uses). Use your own home network’s range.

5. Apply the change. This recreates the dashboard container with the new settings; the receiver keeps running:

   cd ~/looku/deploy
   docker compose up -d dashboard

   You should see ✔ Container looku-dashboard-1 Started.

Check: with Tailscale on and your phone on mobile data, open http://100.101.102.103:8788. The login page should appear. With Tailscale off, the page should not open at all.

If you use Tailscale’s MagicDNS name (for example http://homeserver:8788), add it to LOOKU_API_HOSTS too, or the dashboard answers Unknown host.