Expose Localhost to the Internet: SSH Tunnels, frp, and Cloudflare Tunnel

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:30:00 +0800

Last week I needed a colleague overseas to test a feature running on my local machine. My laptop had no public IP, sat behind a home router’s NAT, and I wasn’t about to open port forwards on a network I share with my family. Sounds familiar?

This problem — making a local service reachable from the public internet — comes up constantly in software development. Webhook testing, mobile QA on real devices, client demos, cross-region collaboration. The need is universal, yet the networking reality makes it surprisingly hard.

Tunneling on Bruce on AI Engineering

Expose Localhost to the Internet: SSH Tunnels, frp, and Cloudflare Tunnel