In praise of Cloudflare Tunnels for self-hosting

When self-hosting I’ll often setup a great application that works on my internal network but¹,

• I want to access it when I’m not at home
• I don’t trust the application’s security and need an additional layer before exposing it to the internet
• I don’t want my application’s inbound traffic to go to my residential IP address
• I don’t want to pay $5/month for a box just to route traffic through
• I need to access these applications from computers I don’t fully control, for instances work computers

Some background on myself: I do self-hosting as a hobby, but I try to keep it as practical as possible, since I genuinely do need to use the applications I use, and I need them to be reliable and not too expensive. A couple years ago I switched from self-hosted Nextcloud to Dropbox because my Nextcloud box couldn’t handle generating thumbnails on all my photos: it wasn’t worth paying more than Dropbox for a custom solution that would struggle to let me scroll through thousands of photos.

This event also led me to avoid VPS’s. $6/month boxes are everywhere, and I still regularly use Vultr but with 1 vCPU tier any intensive tasks are not going to be fast enough to replace an SAAS solution. And, because most of this use is spiky, they need to be over-provisioned. Anything more complicated than a single shared CPU quickly breaks the inexpensive principle.

So, enter Patrick, my old gaming PC, following my cartoon-based naming scheme for my home network. I sold the GPU and now just use it as a server. This is useful even without any web applications: I’ll often SSH in and use yt-dlp to download some videos, run rtorrent to grab a Linux ISO, or have a long-running nethack4 game in tmux. I’ll also have some crons running, such as to back up Dropbox.

But, how do I run web applications? I’m a big fan of gitea but it’s not useful if I have to be home. Now, enter Cloudflare Tunnel. Create a system account, a systemd service, generate some credentials on Cloudflare’s web interface, and add a config,

tunnel: 
credentials-file: /home/cloudflare-tunnel/.cloudflared/.json
ingress:
  - hostname: gitea.example.com
    service: http://localhost:8080
  - service: http_status:404

And add the following CNAME entry: <TUNNEL-UUID>.cfargotunnel.com.

It’s not so simple that it just works: there’s gaps in the documentation and you need to fiddle with settings to get an authentication layer in front. I still haven’t figured out how to remove that authentication layer: right now you need to give it an approved email to get to gitea, but that’s what I want anyway.

But it’s pretty close for this sort of thing. I can pretty much deploy a new self-hosted application on my home hardware in a few commands, a config change, and a DNS change from Cloudflare’s interface. I have a couple programs I wrote in python to scrape information from other sources and reformat them into less-distracting HTML files, and now I can just expose nginx as a private application and access those from anywhere.

This website isn’t hosted on Cloudflare since I have some misgivings on them throwing Captchas in front of anyone who looks suspicious, and exposing everyone who accesses my website to their traffic analysis. I’m not tyring to be a fanboy. But their team does some genuinely impressive things, and this is one of them. It’s a bit buggy in places, but it’s magical to me that I can re-use old hardware and have that routed for use over the internet, without exposing a residential IP address for free ².