How to expose apps running in your home lab server securely to public internet thru cloudflare tunnel?
This post will guide you to expose your local development websites and webhooks or any http applications running in your home servers to public internet in a safe and secure manner using free Cloudflare (cloudflared) tunnel client also known as Argo Tunnel. It is 100% free and doesn’t requre any registrations or Credit card details.
Use cases
Common usecases where tunneling softwares will be handy
Architecture
cloudflared is command-line client for Cloudflare Tunnel, a tunneling daemon that proxies traffic from the Cloudflare network to your origins. This daemon sits between Cloudflare network and your origin (e.g. a webserver) as shown in the network architecture diagram.
Getting Started
Download cloudfalred tunnel client
Installation
cd into the folder where your downloaded cloudflared
cd [path where your downloaded cloudflared]/Run the tunnel pointing to your local website url. In my case, I am running grafana in a docker container at port 3000
./cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000Cloudflared Features
Cloudflared shortcomings
The cloudflared tunneling client doesn’t support non http protocols (i.e. tcp). E.g. expose MS SQL Server or PostgreSQL dabases running your local.
Alternate softwares
ngrok supports both http and tcp however the free version supports just one instance of ngrok.
Expose MS SQL server running in your local machine at port #. 1433
./ngrok tcp 1433