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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Selfhosted
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Run WireGuard on some home machine. (Does not need to be the machine the app you want to access is hosted on.)
Run WireGuard on your road warrior system.
There is no step 3.
I'm doing this right now from halfway around the world from my house and it's been great. Been using iPhone, iPad, and macOS clients connected to linuxserver/WireGuard docker container. Been doing this on many WiFi networks and 5G, no difference.
Is wire guard a service you pay for? Otherwise how does wire guard in your home machine not need your router to forward ports to it? And then the remote client need to be pointed at your home’s external IP?
WireGuard is free. Obviously my instructions didn't go into detail about specifically how to set everything up. Port forwarding is required. Knowing your servers external IP address is required. You also need electricity, an ISP subscription, a home server (preferably running Linux), so on and so forth. This is /c/selfhosted after all.
Yeah that’s fine. The steps were so simple I figured they could work without router config changes if they made some kind of connection handshake in a third party service’s server.
But given all that, I wonder if it makes sense to look into if your router has its own vpn server (or flash the firmware with one that does.)
Doesn't that need like a static IP address, port forwarding and dealing all kind of network annoyances?
Recommending wireguard to people feels like recommending Arch to first time Linux users.
You don't need a static IP address, but you do need a public IP address. You can use dynamic DNS to avoid having to keep track of your IP address. FreeDNS will work fine for a basic setup.
Wireguard is one of the easiest VPN servers to use. If you're not using your ISP's router, it may even have Wireguard built in.
Apologies for the dumb noob question, but if your iOS device is VPNed to your home server, how does it access the open internet? Does it do this via the VPN?
WireGuard routes certain traffic from the client (your iPhone) through the server (the computer at your house). If you route all traffic, then when your iPhone accesses the internet, it's as if you were at home. Since that WireGuard server is sitting on your home LAN, it is able to route your phones traffic to anything else on that LAN, or out to the internet.
Wireguard clients have a setting called AllowedIPs that tells the client what IP subnets to route through the server. By default this is
0.0.0.0/0, ::/0, which means "all ipv4 and all ipv6 traffic". But If all you want to access are services on your home LAN, then you change that to192.168.0.0/24or whatever your home subnet is, and only traffic heading to that network will be routed through the WireGuard server at your house, but all other traffic goes out of your phone's normal network paths to the internet.Ahh. But what if you already used a VPN on the client for normal browsing etc - can you have two VPNs configured?
No, think of a VPN as a network cable. You can only send out of one or the other.
Now, if you are connected to a device that has another VPN to somewhere you want to go, then technically yes you would be using 2 VPN connections.