I recently bought a Homey Bridge (latest firmware), thinking it could replace all my separate IoT bridges (like Hue, IKEA, Tuya, etc.). Unfortunately, I’ve found out that this functionality requires a Homey Pro, which I find too expensive.
Since I had some spare hardware (a ZimaBoard and a Zigbee antenna), I set up a Home Assistant instance (Core version 2025.5.2). It’s accessible externally via Traefik and Cloudflare using DDNS. The frontend loads without any issues, and everything seems to be working fine.
However, I’m now trying to connect the Homey Bridge to my Home Assistant instance, and it fails with the following error:
“Error: server responded but does not seem to be a Home Assistant server.”
Interestingly, it does work when I use my WAN IP directly, but since my IP changes often, this isn’t a viable long-term solution.
Does anyone know how I can get this working through my Cloudflare + Traefik setup? Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated!
To be honest, I’d buy a used Pro if I were you. The current idea is too much of a hassle, and completely internet dependent.
Especially when you don’t have a sort of fixed outside IP address.
The Homey HA app for Homey Cloud only works when connecting with your internet IP address, and a port forward for HA.
(The Homey HA community app for Homey Pro uses a local connection)
I"ve no clue about cloudflare and Treafik.
In case of problems, I always start with the simplest setup to connect, to be sure it works.
After that, enable cloudflare, and so on.
Does Cloudflare offer their website protection mechanisms on tunnels? If so, it may consider the connections being made from Athom’s cloud servers to be potentially risky and insert a mitigation page in between, causing the error.
The issue is that I have a dynamic external IP address. When I connect Homey to Home Assistant using the IP address, it works — but only until my IP changes.
Once that happens, I can’t just update the IP in Homey. I have to completely remove the Home Assistant instance and re-add it from scratch, which is quite frustrating.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’m not using a Cloudflare Tunnel — I’m running a standard DNS setup with Cloudflare (proxy enabled) and Traefik as a reverse proxy.
The Home Assistant frontend loads fine externally via HTTPS, so the domain resolves correctly, and Cloudflare isn’t blocking or injecting any challenges — no WAF events or JS challenges are showing up in the firewall logs either.
The real issue is that Homey requires a static, directly reachable IP or domain. When I use my external (dynamic) IP, it works until my ISP changes the IP. After that, the Homey integration breaks completely, and there’s no way to update the IP or domain — I have to remove and re-add the Home Assistant instance from scratch.
So it’s not a Cloudflare protection issue — the root problem is that Homey doesn’t handle DDNS or proxied domains well and doesn’t let you modify the connection settings after initial setup.
No problem.
Yes I understand the issue of a dynamic external IP address.
But I don’t understand why you have to start from scratch when it changed.
You’d just have to enter the new external address as Home Assistant URL in the HA Companion app:
I know. But silly me, assumed there’s always a repair function for cloud connections
The config is done during install of the first device, and can’t be edited after. Which I obviously didn’t test yet.
So now I understand what you meant with “from scratch”, I thought you meant to install the HA machine from scratch, what didn’t make sense.
Now, you’ll have to request Athom kindly for these additions:
The choice to enter a URL OR an IP address;
And / or
The option to change / repair the IP / URL when you have a dynamic external IP.
FWIW, the check that the app performs to see if it’s talking to a Home Assistant server is to see if the string “Home Assistant” occurs in the body text of the response.
If your setup causes a redirect to be issued when accessing the URL that you enter in the HA app, that will likely cause the check to fail (from what I can see, the check doesn’t follow redirects).
