mytunnel-server

mytunnel exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing! No need to mess with DNS or deploy just to have others test out your changes.

This repo is the server component. If you are just looking for the CLI mytunnel app, see (https://github.com/StyleT/mytunnel).

Overview

You can easily set up and run your own server. In order to run your own mytunnel server you must ensure that your server can meet the following requirements:

• You can set up DNS entries for your domain.tld and *.domain.tld (or sub.domain.tld and *.sub.domain.tld).
• The server can accept incoming TCP connections for any non-root TCP port (i.e. ports over 1000).

The above are important as the client will ask the server for a subdomain under a particular domain. The server will listen on any OS-assigned TCP port for client connections.

Setup

# pick a place where the files will live
git clone git://github.com/StyleT/mytunnel-server.git
cd mytunnel-server
npm install

# server set to run on port 1234
bin/server.js --port 1234

The mytunnel server is now running and waiting for client requests on port 1234. You will most likely want to set up a reverse proxy to listen on port 80 (or start mytunnel on port 80 directly).

NOTE By default, mytunnel will use subdomains for clients, if you plan to host your mytunnel server itself on a subdomain you will need to use the --domain option and specify the domain name behind which you are hosting mytunnel. (i.e. my-tunnel-server.example.com)

Systemd config

Sample systemd config file:

[Unit]
Description=MyTunnel service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=ec2-user
Environment=DEBUG=*
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /home/ec2-user/codebase/bin/server.js --port 80 --domain tunnel.example.com

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Setup flow:

sudo setcap CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE=+eip /usr/bin/node # allow non root access to bind below port number 1024
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/mytunnel.service
sudo systemctl start mytunnel
sudo systemctl enable mytunnel # Add to autoload
journalctl -f -u mytunnel # See logs

Use your server

You can now use your domain with the --host flag for the lt client.

npx mytunnel --host http://tunnel.example.com --port 9000

You will be assigned a URL similar to http://heavy-puma-9.tunnel.example.com.

If your server is acting as a reverse proxy (i.e. nginx) and is able to listen on port 80, then you do not need the :1234 part of the hostname for the lt client.

REST API

POST /api/tunnels

Create a new tunnel. A MyTunnel client posts to this enpoint to request a new tunnel with a specific name or a randomly assigned name.

GET /api/status

General server information.

Deploy

You can deploy your own mytunnel server using the prebuilt docker image.

Note This assumes that you have a proxy in front of the server to handle the http(s) requests and forward them to the mytunnel server on port 3000. You can use our localtunnel-nginx to accomplish this.

If you do not want ssl support for your own tunnel (not recommended), then you can just run the below with --port 80 instead.

docker run -d \
    --restart always \
    --name mytunnel \
    --net host \
    defunctzombie/localtunnel-server:latest --port 3000