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Ionut aka BlitzCloud
Ionut aka BlitzCloud

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Why Cloudflare Argo Tunnels ?

Table of contents:

  1. What are Cloudflare Argo Tunnels ?
  2. How is working
  3. Why Cloudflare Tunnels ?
  4. Requirements
  5. Setup
  6. Advantages

Have you ever wanted to share a preview of a project with a client,friend or to open your own self hosted blog, without the security concerns of open ports ? Perhaps you might heard of solution like ngrok and localtunnel which might do the job for a temporary use case, but in these cases the subdomain is will be random.

1. What are Cloudflare Argo Tunnels ?

Cloudflare Argo Tunnels allows you to connect your services to the Cloudflare network without a public IP address, which is convenient for those who don't have a static IP.You need to install a lite weight demon that will route traffic from an to the internet from the local server.The daemon comes with a CLI from where you can create and administrate the tunnels once you are login.

2. How is working ?

Cloudflare Tunnel Diagram

3. Why Cloudflare Tunnels ?

Besides the security aspects, a cloudflare tunnel will allow you to route a huge variety of protocols throw their network like SSH,HTTP,HTTPS,UNIX and RDP.The presence of an intuitive web interface makes the tunnel management easier. For those of you that are working on a team an want internal tools expose to internet and don't have the time to deal with authentication the SSO tools that the Zero Trust platform has to offer comes in handy, beside this the administrator can limit the access to which apps each team has access to.

4. Before the installation process here are some requirements:

  • A domain name
  • A Cloudflare account
  • To add the domain to your cloudflare account

5. Setup:

After you added your domain to cloudflare you can begin the set up process.

  1. Download and install the right executable.
  2. Go to the Dashboard -> Access -> Tunnels and the create your first tunnel,after this you will be provided with a command to run the tunnel.

6. Advantages:

  • High securitu and customization
  • High avalibily
  • Free tier
  • No need for an static IP address
  • SSO tools

Here I should note that the in order to successfully receive other protocols then http and https both ends should run the cloudflare daemon or the WARP client,but elsewhere Cloudflare tunnels are a reliable, low effort, hight security solution for you to host your service on the internet, that can make use of other in house tools from Cloudflare.

Thx for staying that long and until next time 😀Codding.

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