Ngrok Alternatives

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

by tosh • 4 years ago

244 97 4 years ago

I have to say ngrok was one of the services I've used in life that truly made me go "ohh holy shit." This was several years ago, but it was such a pain point sharing local dev things with other folks, and this made it absolutely so trivial. It felt a bit like when I used prettier for the first time in my code -- instantly I knew I couldn't live without having it in my life. I hope him/they are making good money from the project!

granshaw• 4 years ago

I’m old enough to remember a time where carrier grade NAT wasn’t freaking everywhere and everyone actually had a static dedicated IP address

You could start a multiplayer game of StarCraft just by putting in your friends IP. It was wonderful and how the internet was meant to be

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

While I agree with the sentiment, there are real issues with a truly p2p internet. Even if we switched to IPv6 overnight, everything would still be locked down with firewalls. And what if someone decides to DDoS your blog or geo-locate your IP to figure out what town you live in?

In order to get to a p2p world, I think maybe the best balance point is for most people to connect to the internet through a local tunneling/VPN company which also provides them with a public inbound IP. This has many benefits including:

* Hides all your behavior from your ISP, turning them into a dumb pipe and encouraging net neutrality.

* Since VPNs don't necessarily require hardware, it's much cheaper for VPN companies to start up and compete with each other. This can also have the effect of decentralizing a lot of power into many small local companies, as opposed to large (inter)national ISPs.

* Allows new protocols like IPv6, HTTP/3, etc to be adopted more quickly because VPN companies can implement them for all their users at once.

Unfortunately this technology might need a rebranding first, as a lot of VPN companies these days feel quite scammy and make some dubious claims about what they accomplish.

qbasic_forever3• 4 years ago

It was also a bit of a nightmare of abuse, and a golden age of worm attacks. If you annoyed the wrong person on IRC suddenly your internet was DOS'ed offline.

qbasic_forever3• 4 years ago

Tor/onion hidden services are under-appreciated here and a good fit for potentially replacing ngrok: https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/setup/

You need to run a tor daemon on the server side and then a tor browser or tor on the client side, but other than that there is no other setup or intermediary service/server necessary. This solves a lot of pain that many ngrok alternatives still require you to run (or pay for using) some central hub server, have a public IP & DNS, etc.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

I've been meaning to add Tor to the list. PRs welcome.

madacol• 4 years ago

I made a little write up on how to setup onion services for ssh https://github.com/madacol/knowledge/blob/master/Ssh%20serve...

Just follow the first part, and change the port to whatever you are using

You always need a compatible client on the other side

judge20202• 4 years ago

The client part is exactly why people might use ngrok to get a public hostname - the number 1 priority is access to an internal resource from anywhere in the world with minimal setup, and that ngrok/other mediator means nobody needs any inbound ports open besides via loopback on the host.

qbasic_forever3• 4 years ago

Yeah it depends--I use ngrok (or similar services) for access to internal stuff I run. I don't want to pay money to run a VPS in the cloud when I have a NAS, etc. running it at home. But I also don't want to pay a premium for a public IP at home, and deal with the immense security headache of securing such an entrypoint from the public internet. So a tor hidden service works great as a no cost VPN-like alternative.

But yeah if your goal is "expose this thing with a public IP/DNS" then there is no way around using your own server, or buying/leeching off a service like ngrok.

You don't need any incoming ports open for a tor hidden service either though. Both the server and client side connect out to tor, and then get routed to each other over it.

cmars• 4 years ago

I made a little utility for tunneling with the Tor daemon. Check out https://github.com/cmars/onionpipe.

onionpipe forwards ports on the local host to remote Onion addresses as Tor hidden services and vice-versa.

controversial97• 4 years ago

If things that require client side software other than a standard browser count, then there is the Yagdrasil network and Hamachi.

tomjen3• 4 years ago

A simple alternative: I have a new asus router with built in support for their DynDNS clone. I can then buy a cheap domain, cname it to the asus domain and have Caddy proxy forward a subdomain to my laptop.

It will be lots cheaper per month than Ngrok, of course, but it will take more setup.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

This will work as long as your laptop stays on that network, and as long as you don't mind your IP address being public.

jwr• 4 years ago

I really like ngrok, but I keep bumping into a limitation: if I leave a development tunnel open from one machine, there is no way to shut it down remotely and open it elsewhere.

I am hoping this will be added one day, because it blocked me a number of times already.

erikschoster• 4 years ago

That would be a handy thing to do. A workaround could be to have a raspberry pi or similar as your ssh access point to a local network via ngrok, with your main ngrok service running on another machine on the local network in screen or tmux. Then just ssh into the raspberry pi, connect to the machine running the main ngrok service, drop into the session and reconfigure as you like?

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Maintainer of the list here. Take a look at my boringproxy project. Once you have the clients running on each machine, all the tunnels can be managed through a web UI on the server. With a little elbow grease[0], you can also SSH into any of the clients (as long as they have sshd running).

[0] https://forum.indiebits.io/t/how-to-forward-ssh-port-example...

joemclarke2• 4 years ago

There is a beta feature you can enable to shutdown any open tunnel from the dashboard. It’s under tunnel agent, status.

I use this every day because I always forget to shut down the agent on my home computer before going to the office.

itsananderson• 4 years ago

I feel like half of Ngrok's value prop is being undervalued here. Namely the fact that it captures requests for inspection and replay. That feature is an absolute game-changer for developing things like Webhooks.

First, it lets you easily see what the Webhooks payload looks like in real life. Second, it lets you hit your endpoint repeatedly with the same payload (while iterating on your code), without having to trigger the 3rd party event again.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

That is a great feature, but a dev-centric one. If your focus is instead on self-hosting from behind a NAT, things like end-to-end encryption become more important. There are always tradeoffs.

francislavoie• 4 years ago

Ngrok isn't the only one of those that do that though. It's not a unique feature. Hence why there's alternatives listed.

thrower123• 4 years ago

I've more or less stopped using Fiddler and Postman since I started using ngrok.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 4 years ago

Fwiw my shell alias looks like this

``` ssh -tR "${HOST_PORT}:localhost:${LOCAL_PORT}" "${USER}@${HOST}" "multitail --basename -mb 2MB --follow-all --mergeall -n 0 -cS apache /srv/mydomain/logs/access.log -n 0 -cS apache_error /srv/mydomain/logs/error.log" ```

Which at least lets me see the nginx request logs as they come in. But no, I can't replay them or anything.

ithrow• 4 years ago

Have anyone run ngrok on ubiquiti routers, how did it go?

bredren• 4 years ago

Longtime ngrok customer.

It seems like ngrok went from kind of a humble presentation to a more splashy look and maybe larger feature set.

The company is also actively recruiting sr swe’s right now.

Was the product bought or did the company take capital relatively recently?

It was such an understated thing for so long.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Personally I think they might be feeling the heat from Cloudflare Tunnel. To quote myself from a couple weeks ago[0] (note that an ngrok employee responded to some of my concerns):

As much as it pains me to say it, Cloudflare seems well positioned to eat ngrok's lunch. AFAIK they offer everything ngrok does plus auto TLS certs, CDN, domain name registration, and tons of other features. They also have way more edge servers for terminating tunnels close to the origin devices. And they can afford to do all this for free as a loss leader product. It's the AWS bundling effect. Oh and the client source code is available.
I don't want to see Cloudflare completely take over this space, but Cloudflare Tunnel is tough to compete with.
One knob ngrok could still turn is adding auto TLS certs which are managed on the client side. Then you can offer e2ee which is something Cloudflare will probably never do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260530

samhw• 4 years ago

I'm amazed even to hear the words "an Ngrok employee", like it were Google or something. The last time I remember reading about Ngrok, it was just one guy's repo on GitHub. That doesn't even feel that long ago. I'm stunned and perplexed to hear all of this.

wenholz• 4 years ago

Greetings! Director of Eng here at ngrok. Figured I should say something (more of a lurker than I care to admit) since someone mentioned the recruiting side of things ;)

We haven't been bought and haven't taken any capital, but we have made some massive investments into our product: new ways of connecting, new ways of securing, reliability, etc. There are a couple announcements coming soon I don't want to spoil. We've been a quiet crew for a while!

On the recruiting side, we've got tons of openings in product engineering (junior, senior, management, PMs) and across the rest of the company. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have an interest in working with us.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

We use Cloudflare Tunnels. It is the easiest and has an excellent client (open source under Apache license).

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Cloudflare Tunnel is what I (maintainer of OP list) currently recommend for most people. It's an excellent free service. Main downsides are:

* You can't do end-to-end encryption, ie Cloudflare terminates TLS for all requests and can see your data.

* Cloudflare's ToS specifically says you can only use the free tier for HTML websites. Anything else (ie video streaming, photo albums, etc) is technically grounds for suspension, although that seems to be rare in practice.

* Not open source. You can't self-host the server. (EDIT: Client is Apache licensed now) Client source code is available but not FOSS.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

Client source code is available but not FOSS.

They recently changed that, may be I am missing something?: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/blob/master/LICENS...

moonchrome4• 4 years ago

Ngrok was really cool since I never thought about reverse proxying my localhost before l tried it.

But for the price of ngrok I'm paying for a domain and a 2gb ram/2 CPU VM on hetzner and using SSH tunnels to nginx reverse proxy.

And setting up a shared server for a team with subdomains is just 10 mins of config changes per user - no way they can justify the cost for me.

If it was some symbolic price like 20$/year then I wouldn't bother, otherwise I'll take the VM I can load other random dev crap to when I need it.

And you're using standard web tech to set this up - if you aren't familiar with something required to set this up you will be better off learning it in the long run (if you're the target audience for ngrok) : VM setup, nginx, reverse proxy, SSH tunneling, let's encrypt, domain management/DNS - all valuable fundamental skills to acquire on a small project.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

For developers, I largely agree with you, though even in that demographic often it's nice to not have to fiddle with the details yourself, even if you know how.

But I'm interested in a different demographic. Someone who wants to run their own blog, or run a Nextcloud server for their family, or host albums from their photography work shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS certs, IP addresses, ports, etc. They should be able to install an app on their laptop (or old Android phone, or Raspberry Pi), go through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel out of their home network, and have their content available to the rest of the web.

Obviously there are UX and security concerns, but these are solvable problems.

judge20202• 4 years ago

, and have their content available to the rest of the web.

The issue is that DNS and registrar services are fragmented by design, and there doesn't seem to be a standard DNS API that would make it easy to simply say"select your domain registrar" and use that to start an oauth flow then manage DNS records for a site. Therefore, anyone who does run even a simple service like hosted wordpress (without using the host as their registrar) needs to at least have basic knowledge of what DNS records are and how to put in their registrar without messing up email records or other subdomains they might have.

bauerd• 4 years ago

Servers require maintenance. Time is money

hardwaresofton• 4 years ago

Do you ever run into performance issues with the shared machines at the low end? I've found the shared CPUs can be a little iffy under load but if you're basically running reverse proxying only it must not be an issue

Also do you think you'd pay $40/year? that's less than what you're paying Hetzner for no management.

moonchrome4• 4 years ago

I've been running stuff like code server [1] for some workshop I held recently and I was building simple .NET projects there without any issues.

I wouldn't pay $40/year because the value of having a random instance up with domain/ssl and nginx running all the time has been handy many times so far - worth way more than what I pay for the machine. At this point ngrok would be a downgrade for my use case, but if it was something like 20$/year when I was looking into it I probably wouldn't have bothered setting it up.

[1] https://github.com/coder/code-server

leftnode2• 4 years ago

As a developer and business owner, I literally can't comprehend this response. I can't imagine idea of having to manage yet another server over running

    ngrok http 8000 -subdomain=my-custom-subdomain

from the root of my application (which is wrapped in a single line shell script). For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error.

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

I also think one should razor sharp focus on delivering customer value to be successful instead of introducing new tech you need to manage.

chrischen2• 4 years ago

You probably don't need to manage another server. ngrok's functonality can easily be containerized for easy self-deployment on infrastructure.

For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error.

$10 here, $10 there, and next thing you know every unix command line app I'm running is charging $10.

razemio• 4 years ago

This response only makes sense if you are not into DevOps, which I think you should as a developer. Take a random server exposed to the internet, use caddy or treafik to setup a reverse proxy. It takes like 20 seconds to create a reverse proxy to a random host connected via ssh.

Even easier, create predefined ports in caddy and connect to those via ssh. Assign domains to them like proxy<1-1000>.example.com. Connect to one via ssh that is free. Done. That's 2 seconds once it is setup.

Even easier and cheaper if you do not have a "random server exposed to the internet", take one of the alternatives shown by op which allows to deploy a digital ocean or Hetzner vm automatically. Done, like a few seconds from the command line.

10$ a month for something like this is over priced but I guess you prove that it is a valid business.

moonchrome4• 4 years ago

I've set this up for myself 4 years ago and it just works, having a nginx instance online was really useful many times, eg. just recently I had to setup custom routing rules for services configured on AWS load balancer, just setup the same routing rules on my nginx and tunneled my local services - spent 10 minutes to get a working environment for debugging on local machine - with ngrok I would need to setup a local reverse proxy and tunnel that, small time saver but there have been a lot of instances like this, where I'm like - oh let me just throw this on my garbage server to transfer, let's host it there for a demo, let me install code server there for a workshop, etc. It was there, running on my domain, I know how it's setup - much better value proposition than ngrok for the same price.

I also set it up for a team I worked with - took me 2 hours to get it running again and then the rest of the day to document and add keys for people and explain how and why they should use it. This was a team of 9 people - so in one day I did 1080$ - cost of small instance - for the year. That's above my daily rate so worth it for the owner as well.

10$/dev/month is not a lot - but this is such a trivial service that you setup once and forget, also there's a lot of friction in getting things like this approved and pretty much everyone has a some discretionary cloud provider budget.

pid-1• 4 years ago

For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error

Yes, but every tool on the wild wants you to pay 10 bucks per user per month. github/gitlab, jira, random CI/CD tool, gitpod, private repo, tailscale/zerotrust, dockerhub, 1password, okta, notion...

Depending on your size, those costs can add up pretty quickly.

ngrok is a very low hanging fruit for keeping expenses at bay, 10 bucks per user is ridiculously expensive for the service they are providing.

unicornporn• 4 years ago

This simplifies:

https://boringproxy.io/

Written by the same guy that wrote awesome-proxy list in the original post.

antoniomika• 4 years ago

Setup https://github.com/antoniomika/sish and get away from manually setting anything up. Uses SSH, supports HTTP(S)/TCP/Websockets/TLS via SNI and let’s users choose their own tunnel names. Can run it on a free instance from google or oracle.

patricklorio• 4 years ago

I'll need to make a PR to add https://playit.gg :). Been working on it for the past two years. Offers UDP support, ability to tunnel a range of ports, and provides a fixed IP and port. I recently purchased a /24 and moved the entire service to an anycast network. An entire datacenter can go down and connections will keep going .

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

UDP and Anycast are great features. Can you tunnel anything or just game servers?

Also, I would love to hear about your experience buying a /24 if you've written about it somewhere.

johnmarcus• 4 years ago

i'll need to open a pull request for [tolocal](https://github.com/nelsonenzo/tolocal) :). It's clunky because it requires node and terraform and AWS, but all your stuff is self hosted and can be e2e encrypted, costs almost nothing, can be used with real domain names, etc. I would like to make it all JS at some point (the actual terraform is minimal), but it's hard to see why when Cloudflare Tunnel is a thing now.

mobilio2• 4 years ago

ngrok related question.

Since ngrok is written on Go here is some pure C clone: https://github.com/dosgo/ngrok-c

I will appreciate if someone assist how to run it.

Here is issue: https://github.com/dosgo/ngrok-c/issues/84

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Nice, I didn't realize there was a C port of the ngrok client. Since this seems intended for embedded devices/routers, you might also be interested in rathole:

https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole

mobilio2• 4 years ago

IMHO - for 500k binary much better is userland C++ implementation of WireGuard: https://github.com/TunSafe/TunSafe

inconshreveable3• 4 years ago

hi folks, i’m the founder/creator of ngrok. happy to answer any questions.

we’ve got some exciting improvements we’re looking to share with the community very soon here

<3 to you all

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm currently incubating a similar product.

Honestly I would be very interested in hearing what you think the best plan for competing with Cloudflare Tunnel is. I've been keeping a close eye on this space for a couple years now, and Tunnel seems well on its way to dominating the mindshare.

It can be very hard to compete with a bundled loss-leader offering.

inconshreveable3• 4 years ago

happy to chat more about our future plans offline, feel free to send me a note. i’m alan at ngrok dot com. would be curious to see what project you’re incubating!

rglover• 4 years ago

Just sending a thank you. I've happily been a customer for years. Love the constant improvements and stable service. Great product.

ctrlaltdylan• 4 years ago

Hi @inconshreveable, happy user for many years and have done some crazy ngork remote setups to make systems like gitpod / docker work with ngrok.

Question for you - do you have a plan in mind for handling teams?

Right now it seems like the only way to handle it is with a manual naming convention:

https://{my-team-name}-{my-name}-api.ngrok.io

And then every single team member has to copy this convention by hand and you have to register webhooks, etc with these new routes.

It gets tedious fast.

Do you have ideas to work around this or register team members behind the scenes and still route traffic appropriately?

inconshreveable3• 4 years ago

can you tell me a little bit more about what's tedious about it and/or the higher-layer problem you're trying to solve?

edit: feel free to email me as well at alan at ngrok dot com

leftnode2• 4 years ago

Absolutely amazing project, happy paying customer.

joemclarke2• 4 years ago

Love, ngrok, thank you!

mrlinx• 4 years ago

The main feature I want out of any of these, and can't seem to find anywhere, is a way to expose private services online hidden behind any sort of social-auth. So think ngrok+oauth2_proxy.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

That's actually a pretty good idea. So basically login with Google/GitHub and then have access to anything being tunneled through the server?

caseysoftware• 4 years ago

You mean doing something like:

ngrok http 80 --oauth=google

That would be pretty cool.

spiffytech• 4 years ago

I've been happily using localhost.run for a few years now. It's free if you don't mind randomized subdomains, and I like that I just connect with SSH instead of needing client software.

danmur• 4 years ago

It's not as convenient out of the box but I use frp. With the deployment and configuration automated it's pretty good.

yewenjie• 4 years ago

Last week I tried setting up BoringProxy from this list on a server running NixOS but gave up at the certificates step. I wish there was a simple NixOS module for something like this.

anderspitman22• 4 years ago

Do you know what issue exactly you were having with the certs? I've been meaning to try NixOS one of these days.

manoji• 4 years ago

Long time lurker here , here is one i have written in java with netty inspired by ngrok and localtunnel which allows for inspection of requests and provides replay . Its Still in development with a lot of rough edges .

https://github.com/manoj-inukolunu/jtunnel-server

https://github.com/manoj-inukolunu/jtunnel-netty-client

djhcfhvf• 4 years ago

if only ipv6 wasnt designed by network giants gripping their aging boxes built on 1940s concepts, monopoly usurers ISP who literary live by a centralized network and profit from nat, and advertising behemoths who still need to attribute clicks to advertising campaigns... we wouldn't be compiling lists of dozens of reverse proxy solutions that do nothing but work around all these things getting in the way of what what's network should have been already.

declnz• 4 years ago

Wow - I was amazed at the sheer number of similar projects here, had no idea there was that much active in this space...

vaporup• 4 years ago

https://oss.rport.io

amankalra172• 4 years ago

I would like to mention "Loophole Cloud". I'm one of the developers of Loophole and might be a little biased, but they do offer end-to-end encrypted services like custom hostnames and unlimited tunnel active time at no cost. I would be happy if there is any feedback we could learn from :)

gtz6000• 4 years ago

If I could only decipher how to make an account in the first place, I'd use it.

piperswe• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a Cloudflare employee, but not on a team related to Tunnel.

I use Cloudflare Tunnel for all of my self-hosted applications (e.g. https://piperswe.me). Configuring it can be a bit of a pain (generating secrets, setting up systemd service, etc.), but its integration with the rest of the Cloudflare CDN products is worth it IMO.

ravish0007• 4 years ago

I like telebit, found via "Look Ma, No Cloud" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1Q2MWGCADo)

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