A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust and Open Source

joaoh82

A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust. Expose local services through a public server over encrypted WebSocket connections with TLS termination, HTTP/TCP proxying, a live dashboard, Prometheus metrics, and audit logging.

mikeocool

One of my vendors recently disallowed registering ngrok URLs for testing webhooks. They said they were too unreliable — and the vendor was getting blamed for ngrok failing to deliver requests. Seems like a real shame that they’ve been abandoning their core product that was reliable for years in pursuit of nebulous AI/enterprise routing products. I get that dev tunnels are probably not a massive business that’s going to get VCs mouths’ watering, but maybe not every business needs to shoot the moon? Anyway, glad competitors are coming in to fill the space.

joaoh82

Btw, if anyone wants to test on our own servers just request an api key with github issues: https://github.com/joaoh82/rustunnel?tab=readme-ov-file#gett...

freedomben

Really glad to see someone stepping up to fill this void! I've debated doing this myself many times but it's low on my list of priorities. Please don't interpret these frank questions as criticism or mistrust up front, but we've been burned a few times with tools like this start open source and then realize there might be some money out there and go proprietary, usually with a rug pull. I don't mind offering paid hosting at all (in fact I think it makes sense to offer that) so long as the code all remains open source. The "open core" model may even be ok so long as it's truly just "enterprise" feature that are gated, though that's a hard line to tread. What are your monetization plans? Are you committed to long-term being actually open source? Personally, I would suggest licensing this as AGPL to ensure that if anyone does take it and try to stand up a paid/proprietary service based on your work, the license will at least force them to open their code. It's not perfect. but with MIT you have zero defense against that. It would also give people like me some peace of mind.

abricq

Interesting project. Is the main value to "self-host your own ngrok", or is it to actually compete with ngrok using an open-source project ? If so how do you intend to monetize your project ?

ollybee

Add it to the list https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

mewrcreate

We hit this exact problem bridging n8n Cloud to a local Ollama instance on a Mac Mini. Tried Cloudflare tunnels (502 errors), bore-cli (random ports on restart — unusable with multiple HTTP nodes), and ngrok (requires auth/signup). Ended up on localtunnel with a fixed subdomain and keepalive script. It works but drops connections and requires a bypass-tunnel-reminder header on every request. Key requirements for this use case: fixed/predictable URL so downstream services don't need reconfiguration, low latency for API calls, and auto-reconnect as a daemon. Would be interested to try Rustunnel if it supports fixed subdomains.

kwakubiney

Interesting. Currently building something simpler with outbound[1]. Decided to go with gRPC instead, but mine is mostly focusing on developers, for basic HTTP service reverse tunneling. [1] https://github.com/kwakubiney/outbound

veverkap

Not trying to be a jerk but how is this different than the Rust solutions listed on https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling already? What makes your solution better or different?

jockm

Personally I don’t care what it is written in. I care what the code does and how well it does it. Rust is a cool and interesting language that helps solve some problems, but it doesn’t make it immune from all. But that doesn’t make it inherently better, or worse for the job. We have seen this trend for everything from C++ onwards (Java, Ruby, C#, Python, etc etc)

merb

Well since it still not uses a custom port for the client connection and not plain h2 streaming what’s the difference to pangolin? I mean it does not like it has that much more benefits? If clients would also connect to 443 h2 than yeah. But in Corporate environments having a port different than 443 always is a pain no matter the protocol.

search_facility

Interesting! Can it be used in Google Colab to open temporary access to python server? NGROK can be attached this way in 6 lines of code

DeepTradeX_83

This is a great resource. Bookmarked.

ChrisLanca61570

we tried something similar at work. main gotcha was memory usage at scale