self hosting of bore (a tunneling service)

medhat

bore is a tool to create tunnels to localhost. Is it possible to host it on opalstack as an app so that I can expose some local urls as a subdomain to one of my domains hosted on opalstack?

Thanks for a great service.

sean

medhat I've not been able to successfully install bore on an Opalstack server and after reading its README I don't think it's good fit for our platform because its control port can't be changed to use a unique port assignment.

Luckily you don't need bore to do what you've described - you can instead use SSH like so:

Create a "Nginx Proxy Port" app and make a note of its port assignment.
Attach the new app to site.
On your own computer, start your local server process.

On your own computer, run the following command to forward your local port to your Opalstack server. In this example, user@opalN.opalstack.com is your shell user, 55555 is your port assignment, and 8000 is your local port:

ssh user@opalN.opalstack.com -R 55555:127.0.0.1:8000 -N

Your terminal will appear to do nothing after you execute the command, that's to be expected. At this point the port is being forwarded and you can access your local site via your Opalstack server using the URL of the site you created in step 2.

To terminate the tunnel press CTRL-C in the terminal session.

Hope this helps 🙂

medhat

This is great and exactly what I was trying to do. Thanks for the quick response.

anjanesh

What's this about ? ngrok alternative ?

peter

anjanesh Bore can be considered an alternative to Ngrok, as both tools serve a similar purpose of allowing developers to expose their local development environment over the internet via a secure tunnel. Unlike Ngrok, Bore is entirely free and open-source. Bore can be self-hosted, but lacking the option to change its default control port (at least for now) makes it incompatible with our platform.

medhat

I have a follow-up question about this. In general it works great and is exactly what I need. I created a systemd service to start this automatically when my local system boots. I noticed that what seems to be random, after a while the connection will stop working, and it will only start working again when I restart the service. Is this a know issue, is there a way around it, or a good way to debug it? When the connection stops working, systemctl status shows that the service is running, and journalctl does not show any errors.

sean

medhat you might be able to get more information in your logs by adding some verbosity to the SSH command, eg:

ssh -vvv user@opalN.opalstack.com -R 55555:127.0.0.1:8000 -N

You could also try installing autossh on your system (probably available in your package manager) and then modify your system service to run that instead, eg:

autossh -M 20000 -f user@opalN.opalstack.com -R 55555:127.0.0.1:8000 -N

autossh will then spawn the SSH connection for you and reconnect automatically it if it drops.

medhat

sean Thank you so much. I have to say the service you guys provide is very impressive.

sean

medhat You're very welcome! We aim to please 🙂