Table of Contents

• tunneller
• Overview
• How it works
• Installation
  • Source Installation go <= 1.11
  • Source installation go >= 1.12
  • Installation Self-Hosted Server
• Github Setup

tunneller

Tunneller allows you to expose services which are running on localhost, or on your local network, to the entire internet.

This is very useful for testing webhooks, the generation of static-site compilers, and similar things.

Overview

Assuming you have a service running within your local network, perhaps a HTTP server you could access via http://localhost:8080/, you can expose that to the entire internet by running:

$ tunneller client -expose localhost:8080 -name=example

This will output something like this:

..
Visit http://example.tunneller.steve.fi/ to see your content

The location listed will now be publicly visible to all remote hosts. As the name implies there is a central-host involved which is in charge of routing/proxying to your local network - in this case that central host is tunneller.steve.fi, but the important thing is that you can run your own instance of that server.

This is a self-hosted alternative to a system such as ngrok.

How it works

When a client is launched it creates a web-socket connection to the default remote end-point, tunneller.steve.fi, and keeps that connection alive. A name is also sent for that connection.

Next, when a request comes in for foo.tunneller.steve.fi the server can look for an open web-socket connection with the name foo, and route the request through it:

• The server sends a "Fetch this URL" request to the client.
• The client makes the request to fetch the URL
  • This will succeed, because the client is running inside your network and can access localhost, and any other "internal" resources.
• The response is sent back to the server
  • And from there it is routed back to the requested web-browser.

Installation

There are two ways to install this project from source, which depend on the version of the go version you're using.

NOTE: If you prefer you can find binary releases upon our release page

Source Installation go <= 1.11

If you're using go before 1.11 then the following command should fetch/update tunneller, and install it upon your system:

 $ go get -u github.com/skx/tunneller

Source installation go >= 1.12

If you're using a more recent version of go (which is highly recommended), you need to clone to a directory which is not present upon your GOPATH:

git clone https://github.com/skx/tunneller
cd deployr
go install

If you don't have a golang environment setup you should be able to download a binary for GNU/Linux from our release page.

Installation Self-Hosted Server

If you wish to host your own central-server things are a little more complex:

• You'll need to create a DNS-entry tunneller.example.com
• You'll also need to setup a wildcard DNS entry for *.tunneller.example.com to point to the same host.
• Finally you'll need to setup nginx/apache to proxy to the tunneller application.
  • By default this will listen upon 127.0.0.1:8080.

You can find a sample configuration file for Apache2 beneath the apache2 directory.

Github Setup

This repository is configured to run tests upon every commit, and when pull-requests are created/updated. The testing is carried out via .github/run-tests.sh which is used by the github-action-tester action.

Releases are automated in a similar fashion via .github/build, and the github-action-publish-binaries action.