Localtunnel exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing

https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel

by cond289123 • 9 years ago

28 18 9 years ago

neeksHN2• 9 years ago

I must have overlooked this when I unhappily settled for ngrok -- thank you for sharing a FOSS alternative.

juancampa• 9 years ago

I'm curious, what don't you like about ngrok? Is it just that it's a paid service? You do need a server somewhere to forward connections and that normally costs money to run

shubb• 9 years ago

Well indeed - I wonder how these folks are gonna pay for hosting once someone starts testing a video streaming site...

neeksHN2• 9 years ago

Ideological reasons. I'm no Richard Stallman, but try to exclusively use FOSS software. I have made concessions for requirements at work (G Suite, Slack, Ngrok for conference calls/webhooks, etc).

The source for the backend portion is also available, https://github.com/localtunnel/server. Going to set it up shortly on my own personal box, and if it works smoothly I'll be able to present it as a self-hosted alternative to my employer.

notliketherest• 9 years ago

Just want to point out how easy it is to do this using SSH tunnels. ssh -nNT -R :<server port>:localhost:<local port> user@domain

nuggien2• 9 years ago

that requires you to have a server to ssh to, and doesn't give you free https.

tomc19852• 9 years ago

"Free HTTPS"?

SSH encryption is your "Free HTTPS"

alxlu• 9 years ago

While I do see the value having free https, Localtunnel requires you to trust that whatever code they're running on their server is what they say it is (you could deploy their code on your own server, but then you'd probably need to set up https yourself).

For my use cases this outweighs the need for https--on the off chance I need to expose localhost to the web, it's usually for a quick prototype that's only up for a few minutes and doesn't require any sensitive info to be sent.

trevordixon2• 9 years ago

I wrote an SSH server in Go to try to get the best of both. ssh -R 80:localhost:8888 serveo.net. Automatically gives you a subdomain, has features for HTTP inspection/replay, but nothing to install.

irq-1• 9 years ago

Great work. I was thinking of a service using autossh and assigned names would be nice for raspberry pi users that don't know networking. Forward sshd also, and help them setup apache with mod_python... and on and on.

What's the configuration with the SSL? The cert DN name didn't match my assigned sub-domain and it wasn't a wildcard, so how did you make that work? I saw it's from Lets Encrypt, but it seemed instantly setup, so you're not requesting a new cert for each sub-domain, right?

burntrelish12732• 9 years ago

LT is probably the best free tunnel out there. I've tried most of them free and non-free.

thumbs up!

Localtunnel exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing

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