webpage controlled devices

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

Hello, my ultimate goal here is to be able to control different devices in my home from outside of my home network from a webpage.

I understand that you can use relays that you can access from a webpage on your home network that just has a webpage icon that will say LED and you can toggle it on and off.

My question is can i control these relays from outside my network and other devices such as the esp8266, relays. possibly through my router ( if that's how that works) and a webpage??

I do understand that if you enable remote access on your pc, that lets you from outside of your home network to type in your public IP followed by: 8080 into a web browser and access your routers User and P.W homepage. By accessing my home router's webpage, am i able to control such devices?? or is it only done by creating an HTML page??

2

if your esp8266+relay+webserver is already running in your LAN, you could configure "port forwarding" in your router to enable access to everyone who knows your IP/the port.

i.e. define the external port 8081 to be forwarded to your internal esp8266 IP on port 80.

3

Thank you for the response,
That makes sense what you said, but would I need to set up a web page lets say for the esp8266 to be able to interact with it (from outside my network) and a make it do things?
Thanks again

4

Basically you don't need a webpage on the esp "to do things". You could setup only the resource which takes over the commands "do this thing". But most of the html-switch examples you will find in the IDE will bring a simple html page also, and my advice for you is to stick as close to the examples as possible for the beginning.