Access Your Local AI From Anywhere Without Exposing It to the Internet

The actual problem this solves

Accessing Your Setup From Other Devices covers reaching your local AI setup from your phone or laptop at home. That's genuinely enough for most people, most of the time. But it only works because you're on the same home network - the moment you're not home, that Tailscale-free approach stops working, and the obvious next thought is usually port forwarding: opening a hole in your router so the outside internet can reach Open WebUI directly.

Don't do that. Port forwarding to Ollama or Open WebUI puts an unauthenticated service directly on the public internet, where it will be found and probed within hours, not months.

Locking Down Your Local AI Setup already covers this - it recommends a reverse proxy with authentication as "the shape of the fix" without walking through one. Tailscale is the simpler, more beginner-friendly version of that same idea: a private network that only your own devices can join, with no public exposure at all.

What Tailscale actually is

Tailscale creates a private mesh network - called a "tailnet" - between only the devices you sign into it. Each device gets its own private address (something like 100.x.x.x) that only other devices on your tailnet can reach. Nothing is exposed to the public internet; there's no port to scan, because there's no public listener at all. Traffic between your devices is encrypted end-to-end using WireGuard, an established, widely-audited VPN protocol - Tailscale is a friendly setup layer on top of it, not a custom encryption scheme of its own.

Install on the AI machine

On the machine running Ollama and Open WebUI:

Linux

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo systemctl enable --now tailscaled
sudo tailscale up

The last command prints a URL - open it in a browser to sign in and add this machine to your tailnet.

Mac

Install from the Mac App Store or Tailscale's direct download, open the app from Applications, and sign in from the menu bar icon.

Windows

Download the installer from tailscale.com/download, run it, then sign in from the system tray icon.

Install on your phone or laptop

Install the Tailscale app on whatever device you actually want to connect from - iOS, Android, or another computer - and sign in with the same account you used on the AI machine. Both devices need to be on the same tailnet for either one to see the other.

Connecting, with tailscale serve

Open WebUI is still bound to 127.0.0.1 only, exactly as the setup guide installs it - you don't widen the port binding for this at all, unlike LAN access. Instead, on the AI machine, tell Tailscale to serve that local port to your tailnet:

sudo tailscale serve --bg 3000

The --bg flag makes this persist in the background, including across reboots - you only need to run it once. The first time, Tailscale may walk you through enabling HTTPS certificates for your tailnet if they aren't already on; follow the prompt, it's a one-time setup step.

From any other device signed into the same tailnet, open:

https://<machine-name>.<tailnet-name>.ts.net

Find the exact address by running tailscale status on the AI machine, or checking the device list in the Tailscale admin console. This works identically whether you're on the same Wi-Fi or on the other side of the country - and notice there's no port number to remember and no LAN IP that can change on you.

What actually goes wrong

Tailscale is installed on both devices, but they can't see each other

Confirm both devices are actually signed into the same tailnet, not two separate personal accounts. Check the device list in the Tailscale admin console (login.tailscale.com/admin/machines) - both should appear there.

The .ts.net address doesn't load

Confirm serve is actually active on the AI machine:

tailscale serve status

If it shows nothing, the --bg command above either wasn't run or didn't stick - run it again. If it shows the mapping but the page still won't load, confirm Open WebUI itself is actually up with docker ps - tailscale serve can't proxy to a container that isn't running.

Browser shows a certificate warning

This means HTTPS certificates aren't fully enabled for your tailnet yet. Finish that setup in the admin console's DNS tab (enable MagicDNS first, then HTTPS Certificates) rather than clicking through the warning.

Common questions