Cloudflared as proxy for home hosting

[JOduMonT]

I saw few post about cloudflared but didn't see anybody asking it as a request.

As technically Cloudflared act as a reverse proxy and VPN it help to goat at home or on the road by bypassing firewall and ISP limitations.

One great how to and explanation here:

And from what I understood, you could make a single sidekick for every app without the need of a reverse proxy and valid SSL
https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-mods/tree/universal-cloudflared

[girish]

I think this is a good idea. For a short time, I too was stuck in a situation where I did not have a public IP at home. I worked around it by setting up a VPN tunnel by hand (was a bit of work!).

[LoudLemur]

Would it be possible to do this using a service other than Cloudflare, e.g. https://bunny.net ?

[girish]

@LoudLemur I think not. bunny.net is like a CDN (which cloudflare also provides). Here, we talk about cloudflared, which is like a VPN tunnel but with proprietary sauce from cloudflare. I could be wrong, I have not used cloudflared .

I tried to find some alternative to cloudflared but couldn't find any! Looks like an untapped market!

[LoudLemur]

@girish

Here is what the AI is telling me. I will paste links in a bit:

If you're looking for alternatives to Cloudflare's cloudflared service, here are some options to consider:

ngrok
https://ngrok.com/
Serveo
https://serveo.com/en
Inlets
https://inlets.dev/
Pagekite
https://pagekite.net/wiki/OpenSource/
ForwardHQ
https://fuzzysecurity.com/scripts/9.html
localtunnel
https://theboroer.github.io/localtunnel-www/
Teleconsole
https://github.com/gravitational/teleconsole
Sish (has a Docker compose)
https://github.com/antoniomika/sish
PLEX
https://docs.swizzin.net/applications/plex-tunnel/

[LoudLemur]

@LoudLemur

ngrok is proprietary though has some gratis options. I looked for some Free alternatives and found these. Both have a Docker:

Rathole
https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole
Zrok
https://zrok.io/

[necrevistonnezr]

@girish said in Cloudflared as proxy for home hosting:

I think this is a good idea. For a short time, I too was stuck in a situation where I did not have a public IP at home. I worked around it by setting up a VPN tunnel by hand (was a bit of work!).

Would the email server still work „behind“ such a VPN?

[arshsahzad]

Hi @JOduMonT,

I ran Cloudron with a combination of Tailscale & Cloudflared for two weeks without a public IP at my home setup. So far, everything was working well and I didn't encounter any significant issues. Below is the process that I followed:

1# I had two servers - one for Cloudron and the second with docker and docker-compose. Tailscale was installed and configured with Tailscale IP on both servers. The automatic domain configured was disabled in Cloudron and was set manually.

2# I ran the docker-compose.yml file on the second server using the following:

version: '3.8'
services:
  tunnel:
    image: 'ghcr.io/shmick/docker-cloudflared'
    container_name: tunnel
    hostname: tunnel
    restart: unless-stopped
    user: 1000:1000
    env_file:
     - $PWD/tunnel.env
    volumes:
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    command: tunnel run
    network_mode: host

---

TUNNEL_TOKEN={TUNNEL-TOKEN}

3# I set up and configured the domain in the Cloudflared UI, and used HTTPS for the Cloudron Tailscale IP with No TLS Verify enabled.