Set up your portal

Quick start

NerdPortal sits between your guests and your UniFi controller. A guest joins your guest SSID, UniFi redirects them to your branded portal, they fill in the form, and NerdPortal tells your controller to let them onto the network.

You need three things before you start:

• A UniFi controller reachable from the internet (UniFi OS console, Cloud Key, or self-hosted)
• An administrator account on that controller
• A guest WLAN you are willing to put behind a captive portal

1. Create your account

Sign up at /register. You will choose a subdomain here — lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, between 3 and 50 characters. This becomes your portal address, so pick something your guests will recognize. Every new account starts on a 14-day Starter trial with no card required.

2. Work through the setup wizard

Your first sign-in drops you straight into the setup wizard. It has five steps, and you can go back to any step you have already passed:

1. Portal URL — confirm your subdomain or attach a custom domain
2. UniFi Connection — enter and verify your controller credentials
3. UniFi Setup — point your guest network at the portal
4. Branding — logo, colors and welcome copy
5. Launch — test with a real device and go live

You can revisit any of this later from the dashboard. Nothing in the wizard is permanent.

Portal address

Every account gets a subdomain immediately:

https://your-subdomain.unifinerds.xyz

That address works as soon as you sign up and needs no DNS configuration. It is the address you will give UniFi in the next step.

Using your own domain

On Pro and Enterprise you can serve the portal from a domain you control, so guests see wifi.yourbusiness.com instead. Create a CNAME record pointing at our portal host:

Type   CNAME Name   wifi.yourbusiness.com Value  portal.unifinerds.xyz

Then open Settings → Portal URL and select Verify. We resolve the CNAME and check that it points back to us. DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to propagate, so if verification fails on the first attempt, wait and try again.

Changing your custom domain later clears its verified status — you will need to verify the new domain before it starts serving traffic. Your .unifinerds.xyz subdomain keeps working the whole time.

Connect your controller

Go to UniFi in the dashboard and enter four values:

• Controller URL — the full address including scheme and port, for example https://unifi.yourbusiness.com:8443 or https://192.168.1.1 for a UniFi OS console
• Username — a controller admin account
• Password — encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is stored
• Site ID — the short site name from your controller URL. Leave it as default unless you run multiple sites

Select Verify connection. We sign in to the controller and request site health. If that succeeds the connection is marked verified and the timestamp is recorded. Guest authorisation only runs against a verified connection, so this step is not optional.

Changing the URL, username, password or site ID clears the verified flag. Verify again after any edit.

A dedicated admin account

Rather than using your own login, create a separate controller admin for NerdPortal. It makes the audit trail readable and lets you revoke access without changing your own password.

UniFi guest network

This part happens in your UniFi controller, not in NerdPortal. Exact menu names vary between controller versions, but the settings are the same.

Turn on the guest portal

Open your guest network settings and enable the guest portal, then set authentication to External Portal Server. Enter your portal hostname — the subdomain or custom domain from earlier, without the https:// prefix.

Allow the portal through pre-authorisation

Guests have no network access before they submit the form, which includes access to the portal itself. Add these to the pre-authorisation allowlist so the page can load:

• Your portal hostname
• unifinerds.xyz

Missing this is the single most common reason a portal appears to hang on a guest device.

Session length

How long a guest stays authorized is controlled in NerdPortal, not UniFi — set it under Settings. The default is 60 minutes. When a guest submits the form we authorize their MAC address for that many minutes.

Branding the portal

The Branding page controls what guests see. Changes apply to new page loads immediately.

• Logo — displayed above the welcome message; falls back to a WiFi glyph
• Background, primary and text colors — primary drives the button and accents
• Welcome title and message — the headline and supporting line on the form
• Terms and privacy URLs — linked from the consent checkbox
• Redirect URL — where guests land after connecting, such as your homepage or a promotion
• Custom CSS — for anything the settings above do not cover

Which fields to collect

First name, last name and email are always collected. Phone number and date of birth are each optional toggles, as is the terms acceptance checkbox. Collect less than you think you need — every extra field measurably reduces completion, and under GDPR and similar regimes you need a reason to hold each one.

Guest data

Each completed form stores:

• The fields the guest filled in
• Device MAC address, IP address and user agent
• Whether authorisation on the controller succeeded, and when

Browse and filter these under Submissions. Export the current view as CSV or JSON from the same page.

Retention

Submissions are kept for the retention window on your plan — 30 days on Starter, 90 on Pro, and 365 on Enterprise. Export anything you need to keep beyond that.

Who owns this data

You do. You are the data controller for everything your guests submit; we process it on your behalf. That means the terms and privacy policy you link from the portal are yours to write, and requests for deletion come to you. See our privacy policy for how we handle it on our side.

Plans and limits

Each plan includes a number of guest submissions per billing period. A submission is one completed form — a returning guest who reconnects without filling the form in again does not count a second time.

• Starter — 500 submissions, 30-day retention, 1 site
• Pro — 2,500 submissions, 90-day retention, 3 sites, custom domain
• Enterprise — unlimited submissions, 365-day retention, unlimited sites, white-label

When an account reaches its limit the portal stops accepting new submissions and returns a clear message, which means guests are not authorized onto your network until the period rolls over or you upgrade. Keep an eye on usage on the Billing page as you approach the cap. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Troubleshooting

The portal never loads for guests

Almost always the pre-authorisation allowlist. Confirm your portal hostname and unifinerds.xyz are both listed in the guest network settings, then forget the network on your test device and rejoin.

Verification fails

Check the controller URL includes both the scheme and the port — https://host:8443 for self-hosted controllers, no port for UniFi OS consoles. Confirm the controller is reachable from the public internet, and that the admin credentials work in a private browser window.

Guests submit the form but get no internet

The submission is saved even when authorisation fails, so check Submissions — if rows are arriving with authorisation showing as failed, the portal is fine and the controller connection is the problem. Re-verify on the UniFi page. If the controller password changed recently, the stored one is stale.

Guests are dropped sooner than expected

Compare the session length in Settings with any guest policy timeout configured on the controller itself. The shorter of the two wins.

Still stuck

Send us the affected portal address, roughly when it happened, and your controller version. That is usually enough to identify it on the first reply.