How I overcame my issues with the HA add-on and Cloudflare tunnels

[beercity]

Because I need to mainly use Claude in a browser, and I do not have a public IP at home, I found that using the HA MCP add-on was a better option than using the locally installed HA MCP tool.

The issue I ran into was that my Cloudflare Tunnel was making it hard to get the MCP exposed over the public internet. This is the Cloudflare Tunnel add-on I am using

The instructions said that in these cases, you should configure the Cloudflare tunnel with a sub-domain, for example ha-mcp.domain.com, that points to http://localhost:9583 which did not work for me.

What I found worked was getting the hostname of the HA MCP Server Add-on, which is available in the Add-on Information screen. An example of what this will look like is b37de126-ha-mcp

So you would configure the Cloudflare Tunnel HA add-on with http://b37de126-ha-mcp:9583

And then you would configure a Claude connector with https://ha-mcp.example.com/[your_private_key_here]

No port number, Cloudflare will do that translation.

I hope maybe this helps someone else, or maybe this can be used to enhance the documentation.

[kingpanther13]

I assumed this was the path to do it, we can make the setup docs more clear about it if you think it wasn't explained well enough. To be honest this is why I set up the nabu casa webhook addon, I felt that it would be much easier to use than Cloudflare after I Spent hours getting cloudfalre to work personally.

[beercity]

It might be helpful to clarify the docs. Maybe there are more clear docs in other locations, but this what I had found and was working from: https://github.com/homeassistant-ai/ha-mcp/blob/master/homeassistant-addon/DOCS.md#:~:text=Or%20with%20a%20custom%20domain%20%28requires%20DNS%20setup%20in%20Cloudflare%29%3A

[kingpanther13]

Got it, thanks. We have an astro site https://homeassistant-ai.github.io/ha-mcp/ that I assumed most people used. I don't have the chance to review to see if it has better instructions, but I made an issue based off of this so we can clarify documentation going forward.

[beercity]

Thanks. That same thing is in the Documentation tab of the add-on in HA. Not sure where that comes from exactly.

[derekoharrow]

I took a different approach. I've setup Contextforge as an MCP gateway, so all my local MCPs are exposed to Contextforge and I only have to expose Contextforge to Claude through Cloudflare. Works great!