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Remote access for Raspberry Pi

Your Pi stays put.
You go anywhere.

Restart the kiosk. Check the heating. Find out why the Pi is running slowly. All from wherever you happen to be. PiPort lets you reach your Raspberry Pi over SSH or in your browser, without opening ports on the router.

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Early access · Sign-in for existing accounts.

$ piport ssh pi@kiosk-03pi@kiosk-03:~ $ sudo systemctl restart kioskpi@kiosk-03:~ $ exit$ piport forward holiday-ha 8123Forwarding 127.0.0.1:8123 -> holiday-ha port 8123$

Your desk. Their shop. One connection.

A quick fix. Without the road trip.

For the little jobs that would otherwise take you miles out of your way.

  • Bakery, Monday 7:40

    The screen stays black. The Pi is online, but the kiosk service needs a restart. You open a shell from your desk and restart it. The car keys can stay where they are.

    $ piport ssh pi@kiosk-03

  • Holiday flat on the Baltic coast

    Home Assistant runs on a Pi in the hallway cupboard. Before the next guests arrive you want to check the heating. Port forwarding on the landlord's router? Not happening. So you bring the port to your laptop instead and open localhost:8123.

    $ piport forward holiday-ha 8123

  • Weather station on LTE

    No public IP. No access to the router. Normal life on LTE. PiPort reaches your Pi behind CGNAT too, as long as the agent can make an outgoing connection on port 443.

    $ piport ssh pi@weather-lte

  • Shipped yesterday

    The Pi is already at the customer’s. Forgot port forwarding? You don’t need it. If you set up the agent before shipping and the Pi has internet on site, it connects by itself.

The dashboard

Which Pi is up? Which one isn’t?

A shop display, the heating in a holiday flat, a test setup in the office. The dashboard shows which devices are online and when they were last seen. No need to log in to each Pi separately.

Group your Pis by customer or location. Filter to see just the devices you need right now.

Why is the kiosk so slow?

The sun has been on the shop window since noon. The Pi is getting hot and the display is stuttering. The temperature chart shows when it started. Alongside CPU usage, memory and disk space, it gives you clues to the cause.

Just now, or all week? Choose a range from one hour to 30 days. Averages and peaks help you spot even brief spikes.

Browser terminal

Open a browser. Reach your Pi.

Just need to check something? Open Terminal on the device page and sign in with your Pi’s password or key. Your SSH session runs right in the browser. It is encrypted end to end between browser and Pi. Our servers cannot read the session or your password.

The first time you connect, you see the Pi's host key fingerprint. If it ever changes, the terminal warns you before you log in.

Rather use your own terminal? piport ssh hands the connection to your usual ssh client, with your own keys.

One Pi. Then twenty.

The first one works. Now the next shop wants one too. Good thing you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

  • One image for every card. Set up one card, finish with install.sh --golden-image and copy it twenty times. Every copy connects as a device of its own on first boot, as long as the token is valid (seven days). A card copied from a Pi that's already running is recognised as a copy and doesn't take over the original.
  • Groups. Shops Düsseldorf, holiday flats, test bench. The token decides which group a new Pi lands in.
  • Your team. Invite people by email. They see the same devices and can step in while you're on holiday.
  • Only the ports you allow. Every device starts with SSH (22) and nothing else. Allow 8123 for Home Assistant or 1880 for Node-RED per device, in the dashboard or with piport ports.
  • CLI login without copying tokens around. piport login shows a code, and you confirm it in the dashboard. Your phone works too.

One Pi becomes a whole fleet. And you still have them all in one place.

Set it up. Come back anytime.

Set up the agent while you have access to the Pi. Then connect remotely.

  1. Create a token in the dashboard

    Choose “Add device” in the dashboard and create a token. This links the Pi to your account. For multiple devices, you can use a shared token and choose a group.

    Enrollment token

    Shops rollout

    Uses
    0 / 25
    Expires
    11/11/2026
    Group
    Shops Düsseldorf

  2. Run the installer on the Pi

    Run these two lines on the Pi. The installer installs the agent from our signed package repository and starts it as its own service. Running it again updates the agent.

    $ (curl -fsSL https://get.piport.io/install.sh || wget -qO- https://get.piport.io/install.sh) > install.sh$ sudo bash install.sh ppe_…

    Supported systems, updates and troubleshooting

  3. Wait a few seconds

    The Pi shows up in your device list as online. From now on it reconnects by itself after every reboot and every network outage.

    kiosk-03Onlinejust now

  4. Connect

    Open Terminal on the device page or log in to the CLI on your laptop. For SSH, enable the Pi’s SSH server first, using Raspberry Pi Imager or raspi-config. Use piport forward to reach other allowed services.

    $ piport login --api https://api.piport.io$ piport ssh pi@kiosk-03

The Pi calls us. Not the other way round.

The agent opens one outgoing TLS connection to our relay and keeps it open. Nothing on the Pi waits for connections from outside. When you connect, our server issues a ticket for exactly this device and this port. It is valid for 60 seconds and works once.

  • SSH stays end-to-end encrypted between your client and the Pi. The relay only sees encrypted data.
  • Revoke a device in the dashboard, and it's cut off within minutes.
  • If the relay goes down, your Pi keeps running. The agent reconnects by itself as soon as it's back.

A few things you might be wondering.

Which Raspberry Pi models work?

All of them, including the Pi 1 and the Zero, with Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm or Trixie in 32 or 64 bit. The installer also handles Debian 11 to 13 and Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi included.

Does it run on things that aren't a Pi?

Yes. The agent is a static Linux binary for 64-bit ARM, 32-bit ARM and x86-64. Other single-board computers, mini PCs and VMs work just as well. For systems without APT there's a tarball with the agent and its service file. The name is about where we started, not a limit.

What can the relay see?

For SSH, only encrypted data: the encryption runs between your ssh client or browser tab and the Pi. For other ports, both legs to and from the relay are TLS-encrypted, and the relay passes the service's data through as it is. If the service on the Pi speaks plain HTTP, the relay could read it, so use HTTPS on the Pi where that matters. We don't store tunnel traffic. We do log who opened a connection to which device and port.

And if the relay is down?

Your Pi carries on as usual; only remote access through PiPort pauses. The agent reconnects by itself, there's nothing to do on your side. Metrics go to our API, not through the relay, so the charts keep filling.

Where is my data stored?

In Germany. Database, API, dashboard and relay run in our own cluster in Hetzner data centres. Traffic through your tunnels is passed on, never stored. For emails and error reports we use services outside the EU; the privacy policy names them.

Is PiPort part of Raspberry Pi?

No. PiPort is an independent service that works with Raspberry Pi computers. It is not made, endorsed or sponsored by Raspberry Pi Ltd.

Your next quick fix starts here.

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