Cloudflare Tunnels: Expose your local server to the internet.

How can you quickly expose your local server to the internet?
There’s ngrok which is as easy as ngrok http 8000 but it has a free tier and the domain changing every time is a hassle.

So I use Cloudflare tunnels. It is free and you can use your own domain.

Add you domain to Cloudflare and then install the cloudflared tool.

Then create a tunnel using the following command:

1

cloudflared tunnel create my-local-tunnel

This will create a credntial file at ~/.cloudflared/<tunnel-id>.json and a tunnel named my-local-tunnel.

Write this config at ~/.cloudflared/config.yml

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

tunnel: my-local-tunnel
credentials-file: /<User home>/.cloudflared/<tunnel-id>.json

ingress:
  - hostname: game.lamichhaneaayush.com.np
    service: http://localhost:8000
  - hostname: api.lamichhaneaayush.com.np
    service: http://localhost:8080
  - service: http_status:404

Adjust it according to your needs. This will ponit game.lamichhaneaayush.com.np to localhost:8000 and api.lamichhaneaayush.com.np to localhost:8080.

Then run the following commands to create a tunnel and route the DNS.

1
2

cloudflared tunnel route dns my-local-tunnel api.lamichhaneaayush.com.np # point the CNAME for api to this tunnel
cloudflared tunnel route dns my-local-tunnel game.lamichhaneaayush.com.np # point the CNAME for game to this tunnel

Finally, run the tunnel.

1

cloudflared tunnel run my-local-tunnel # run the tunnel

That’s it! Better than typing wss://e78c-27-34-25-179.ngrok-free.app/ right.