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Show HN: Tunnelto.dev – expose localhost with a public URL (built in Rust)

by agrinman on 6/23/20, 6:51 PM with 38 comments

  • by agrinman on 6/23/20, 7:24 PM

    Hi HN!

    I'm Alex, one of the creators of tunnelto.dev. We built this service because it's crucial to be able to test your website, app, or backend server as if it were in production. We built tunnelto.dev is both a free service (hosted by us) and an open source project (that you can host yourself). Both the tunnelto.dev CLI and server are open source on GitHub[1], built in Rust.

    Since you can host it yourself, there's no vendor lock-in...perfect for use in the enterprise when you can't breach the corporate network. Tunnelto.dev is free even with customized sub-domains. We only charge a small monthly fee if you want to reserve specific domains for yourself on our hosted version.

    Happy to answer any questions you might have!

    [1]: https://github.com/agrinman/tunnelto

  • by eat_veggies on 6/23/20, 8:11 PM

    At my last job I used cloudflare tunnels to do stuff like this (stripe web hooks, showing our site to my PM, etc).

    https://developers.cloudflare.com/argo-tunnel/trycloudflare

  • by harrylepotter on 6/23/20, 7:28 PM

    Hey Alex, the pricing is definitely appealing. I currently pay for ngrok, but $15/mo puts it on my watchlist of things to get rid of.

    One thing i do like about ngrok that i didn't seem to see in tunnelto.dev, however, is: - the ability to forward TCP ports (these basically get forwarded to 0.tcp.ngrok.io at a particular port) - the ability to specify a subdomain - this is particularly handy if you want something that's going to stick around for a while (i.e longer than a couple of hours)

  • by yodon on 6/23/20, 7:38 PM

    Speaking as an ngrok user, their documentation is terrible and has caused me to waste huge amounts of time trying to figure out how to do things or whether it can do things. Take documentation seriously (and no, "it's open source" doesn't count as documentation for a product you ask people to pay for).

    Can tunnelto open multiple ports on the same sub domain? Does the documentation explain clearly how to do this or that it's not supported if it isn't?

    Do you support https tunneling (for example https to the subdomain followed by either http or https to the local machine)? Do your docs explain how to do this and if you don't support it do the docs say so?

    I'd love a competitor to ngrok, but it has to actually be better at the places where ngrok is weak (which have very little to do with implementation or functionality)

  • by fokinsean on 6/23/20, 9:08 PM

    Are there any security risks with allowing internet traffic to be forwarded inside your local network? (genuinely curious my networking knowledge is a bit lacking)

  • by chrisweekly on 6/23/20, 7:03 PM

    How does this differ from ngrok?

  • by methyl on 6/23/20, 7:47 PM

    This is just perfect timing, I’m about to set up end to end tests on CI and need Stripe webhooks forwarding. Stripe CLI is not super reliable and ngrok is kind of expensive for what it does, I’ll definitely give it a go.

    What would be super useful is a daemon mode that will run in the background while writing the bound address to STDOUT.

  • by xgenecloud on 6/23/20, 7:07 PM

    Has a broken github link in website.

    Actual link https://github.com/agrinman/tunnelto

  • by Strum355 on 6/23/20, 10:45 PM

    How does this compare to inlets.dev?

  • by skanga on 6/23/20, 8:45 PM

    Any chance of getting binaries for other OSes like FreeBSD instead of just Linux and Windows?

  • by giacaglia on 6/23/20, 6:53 PM

    It def helps when running a local server

  • by lxe on 6/23/20, 7:07 PM

    Can I reverse-proxy ports to paths?

  • by f1refly on 6/23/20, 11:12 PM

    Seemingly everyone in the rust crowd feels the irresistible desire to tell everyone about the language on every possible occasion, why is this? Every other project on this earth the creator just tells about how awesome the product is, how insightful the journey was or how much fun he had with it, but then that one rust guy comes along with "Project x y (Built with rust!)".

    I've got a running joke with a colleague that rust is like the arch linux of programming languages.

  • by paulcarroty on 6/23/20, 7:42 PM

    Looks fun. Is there (optional) IPv6 on front?

  • by eeZah7Ux on 6/23/20, 7:17 PM

    There is already Pagekite and it's been around for many years.