Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels try.cloudflare.com

Put localhost on the Internet with a free, encrypted Cloudflare Quick Tunnel. No account, DNS, or open ports required.

844 points•jcbhmr•13 days ago•316 comments•

#cloudflare #quick #cloudflare quick #tunnels #quick tunnels #cloudflare quick tunnels #localhost #internet

316 comments

noname12012 days ago

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels have existed for more than 5 years (yes, including the anonymous quick tunnels). I copy-pasted the url of the HN link in archive.org, see for yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20211202005430/http://try.cloudf...

Is a new vibe-coded landing page for a 5-year old product really worthy of being on the front page nowadays? There should at least be a [2021] in the title.

malfist12 days ago

I did not know about them and I have a good use for them today. So I found it useful though I agree it needs the date disclaimer

ckvibubueu11 days ago

Web page can't even render on mobile properly

peter_retief12 days ago

Yet so many developers do not know about it.

nijave12 days ago

Didn't these used to be called Argo Tunnels a long time ago? I think Argo Tunnels got repositioned for connecting to origin servers without needing an incoming connection to the origin but I thought they originally did something like this/ngrok

Yeah, I just checked the page >can connect their server to the Internet with Argo Tunnel for free

wbl11 days ago

There was a problem with the name: toxic mine trailings weren't what was wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_Tunnel

hypercube3312 days ago

They are useful for taking local llm models and delivering them with HTTPS to harnesses that expect it or to another machine. Other than that I'm not sure what I'd personally use them for.

makingstuffs12 days ago

I saw the post and was literally thinking "I have been using these tunnels extensively for a couple years now"

TIPSIO12 days ago

My wife and I have a mobile group/shared bot system where we can make mini apps and collab.

Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…

We have Tailscale on our phones and can instantly and privately see without deployment or anything crazy via our secure VPN.

Think shared Claude Artifacts that don’t live @ Anthropic.

Tried to first do this with Cloudflare Tunnels (because I love Cloudflare), but between the broken dashboard side of Zero Trust and nightmare of Warp… it was basically impossible to setup. I guess that’s all super enterprise, which seems to be very anti-Cloudflare philosophically to not be able to self do things.

Will check out Quick Tunnels but I think it’s missing the bigger integration offerings Tailscale has/does still.

theturtletalks12 days ago

Tailscale is truly a cheat code. I have a web app that I run locally to control terminals on my Mac. I access the website on my phone using the 100.xx IP address and can code on the go. No need for a Mac or iOS app.

You can also use Tailscale serve to get a HTTPS url like Cloudflared but it's only visible to your tailnet. Be careful using Cloudflare tunnels because they are public and bots start poking around immediately.

0x1ch12 days ago

Alternatively, Netbird has been a dream to use over the last half year or so. I think their server software has had some hiccups on new releases, but I stagger those updates anyways. All self hosted, similar concept to Tailscale, very good management UI baked into the self hosted product.

SparkyMcUnicorn12 days ago

> You can also use Tailscale serve to get a HTTPS url like Cloudflared but it's only visible to your tailnet

For public access, similar to these cloudflare tunnels, there's Tailscale Funnel.

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel

girvo12 days ago

I love TailScale but was getting crazy battery drain on my iPhone with it installed and setup. Still use it, just not from my phone now

_user_account12 days ago

just use wireguard; tailscale is just the SSO enterprise overlay with a pricing tab.

timwis12 days ago

Fyi you can point a domain/subdomain (eg lan.mysite.com) at that 100.x IP and it will only work for those on your tailnet.

cbsks12 days ago

> My wife and I have a mobile group/shared bot system where we can make mini apps and collab.

> Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…

Can you elaborate on this? Sounds really cool!

dizzard12 days ago

Not OP- I think there’s been some cool solutions popping up around hosting personal apps. On the front page this week was Capsule (https://withcapsule.app/). My personal solution is Exhibit (https://github.com/momja/Exhibit) which also has the goal of being a self-hostable artifact store.

rambleraptor12 days ago

I’ve been building something similar with [Homestead](https://myhomestead.dev). It’s my OSS solution for building mini apps. Each mini app is a Resct frontend and the backend (storage, auth, MCP, API, etc) just comes for free.

ilusion12 days ago

I have my own solution here that also works for sharing stuff with clients with configurable whitelists at artifacts.iofold.com (also open-source for self hosting on cf workers for almost free, github linked on the homepage)

SwamyM12 days ago

Seconded.

allthetime12 days ago

I use public dns routed to private Tailscale ips for all my home services. If i want to expose something for friends who don’t use Tailscale I connect a cloudflare tunnel… it’s pretty much a couple clicks and typing in a subdomain name once cloudflared is running on a server… what were you having trouble with?

pruneau12 days ago

I use NextDNS instead of public DNS to do the same thing.

noir_lord12 days ago

Only reason I have it (cloud flare tunnels) setup for personal use is because I had to do it for work years ago and yeah, Enterprise(tm) is a good description, haven't touched it in years so when it breaks I'll likely use something else.

Getting it to do what I wanted with a traefik front router with cloudflared talking to arbitrary subdomain that is spun up and broadcast from the other project side was very painful in a "this could be more friendly" way.

It has been truly bulletproof though since then so that's almost enough to make me go reread all the docs.

gopalv12 days ago

> it’s missing the bigger integration offerings Tailscale has/does still.

Until I had tailscale serve generating valid certs, I had a good reason to use Cloudflare tunnels.

But in general I don't want to put everything on the internet side of things.

Mostly, I don't want something open, but more like a "share with" for people who are in the same office (virtually over tailnet, not physically on the same LAN).

This still works great for a demo instead of a product pitch, to send an link out to see something.

I'd still use a real host over a laptop for those.

adamfeldman12 days ago

Cloudflare doesn't really seem to care about their tunnel product. "cloudflared service install broken on macOS" since 2021: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/issues/327

st3fan12 days ago

Huh I brew installed it and got a working tunnel in like 15 seconds.

lysace12 days ago

Install via brew worked. Getting the hostname to resolve took 30 mins of waiting. Have they heard of wildcard DNS?

keeganpoppen12 days ago

yeah am i crazy or could it not like already do this as well? i swear i’ve seen somesuch similar in the cloudflared options. maybe not. but i can second having had some problems over the year getting cloudflared to install/set up correctly. tbf the actual feature works amazing once you get it working.

robertlagrant12 days ago

As I understand it you can make a tunnel, but it's under a domain you control and it's a few clicks in the dashboard to set up, and then a something to run in CLI. That's what my homelab uses. This is just a single CLI command and the whole thing is set up.

rplnt12 days ago

Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate? The first subtitle with the font color almost matching the background. Or it's even worse that a human looked at it and said "yep, that's OK"?

lkbm12 days ago

It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.

Gigachad12 days ago

I'm viewing the site on lightmode, clicked one of the #links which scrolled down the page, when I scrolled back up all the sections lost their content and were unusable.

I've never seen someone fail a static page like this. And from a huge company like Cloudflare too..

rplnt12 days ago

I see, good point. Some might be confused about my comment then.

brazukadev12 days ago

which proves the point OP is making.

jeremyjh12 days ago

I find it shocking that they shipped this claudecopy.

eranation12 days ago

I’m raising my eyebrows…

brazukadev12 days ago

Cloudflare is going full vibecoding for at least one year. They are high on AI psychosis.

reaperducer12 days ago

Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate?

We live in an age of monkey-see-monkey-do management.

When Microsoft axed its QA team, it gave permission for everyone else to make the same stupid mistake.

rvz12 days ago

We are in the age of where hype beats reasoning.

nake8911 days ago

The thing that made me the most sad was that nobody cares about narrow screen phones like my iPhone SE

skhameneh12 days ago

There's a number of comments already about how this page looks vibe coded, I'd add that I'm actually shocked at how much this looks like the output of a one-shot prompt. It's not so much that an LLM was used, but a callout on just how generic this page is. How much iteration went into this? At surface it looks like nearly no iteration.

Edit: Well, they just re-vibed it. Went from the most generic Claude 4.6 era to today’s models, quality wise. I wish I had saved a copy of the original, because it would have taken me actual solid effort to make a page that generic out of an LLM.

ruuda12 days ago

"Traffic rides Cloudflare's network" Oh, hello Claude.

hackernud3s12 days ago

How would you say that? I can't think of a clearer way to say it TBH.

PufPufPuf12 days ago

Group of three cards, each with a left-aligned icon, heading and subheading stacked -- that's the m-dash of web design.

vlyan12 days ago

I'll take that over corporate memphis of the previous decade.

(idk if it's really declining or I simply haven't noticed it in a while)

ttul11 days ago

I’m not sure your comment is load-bearing enough…

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