localtunnel
qmux
localtunnel | qmux | |
---|---|---|
4 | 4 | |
3,160 | 223 | |
- | - | |
0.0 | 0.0 | |
almost 2 years ago | about 2 years ago | |
Go | Go | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
localtunnel
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List of ngrok/Cloudflare Tunnel alternatives and other tunneling software and services. Focus on self-hosting.
progrium/localtunnel - As far as I know this is the first ever tool of this kind, predating ngrok and the other localtunnel. No longer maintained, but here for posterity. MIT License. Written in Go.
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Portr – open-source ngrok alternative designed for teams
Thanks for the history. I maintain this list[0], and wasn't aware of OG localtunnel, likely because there's a somewhat newer and now more popular project with the same name[1]. You appear to be correct on timing. Here's the earliest commits on GitHub for each of the projects:
OG localtunnel (2010): https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/tree/fb82920d9d3e538...
Other localtunnel (2012): https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel/tree/93d62b9dbb9f...
ngrok (2012): https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok/tree/8f4795ecac7f92...
I'll see that OG localtunnel gets added to the list for posterity.
[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
[1]: https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel
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Building your own Ngrok in 130 lines
Running a local development server for your app is pretty common, but what if you wanted somebody else to access it? Maybe for a demo, or maybe to debug webhook integrations. If you've ever used Ngrok (or perhaps the original localtunnel), you know what I'm talking about.
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The History and Future of Socket-level Multiplexing
If you've ever used Ngrok to open a public endpoint to a localhost server, you may not know it was one of several clones of a tool I made in 2010 called localtunnel. The original localtunnel was just a wrapper around SSH, literally using OpenSSH on the server side.
qmux
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Making programs interact using qtalk
The connection multiplexing layer is based on qmux, a subset of SSH that I've written about previously. It was designed to optionally be swapped out with QUIC as needed. Either way, everything in qtalk happens over flow-controlled channels, which can be used like embedded TCP streams. Whatever you do with qtalk, you can also tunnel other connections and protocols on the same connection.
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Towards the Personal Potential of Software
Unrelated to macdriver, I released a protocol called qmux with a post explaining why this (but really any) muxing protocol, including and especially QUIC, is such a great primitive for network programming. The project came with two implementations, Go and TypeScript, with more on the way. The post about it was the first explainer article I'd done in a while and people liked it. This was important because the idea behind it was really more valuable than the protocol itself, but regardless we still need implementations of it to exist. To show the idea in action, I built a 130 line version of Ngrok, which turned into a great post walking through how it works.
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Building your own Ngrok in 130 lines
What qmux does is give us a subset of the SSH protocol to multiplex many connections over a single connection. It was the missing piece of my original Twisted prototype. You can read more about how there aren't a lot of these protocols (but perhaps with QUIC are also the future of the Internet) in my previous post.
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The History and Future of Socket-level Multiplexing
If nothing else, I hope people use this story as inspiration to think about using multiplexing to design better, simpler application protocols. Even if for some reason QUIC isn't the future, you now have qmux!
What are some alternatives?
webtransport - WebTransport is a web API for flexible data transport
topframe - Local webpage screen overlay for customizing your computing experience
go-vhost - HTTP/TLS hostname multiplexing library for Go
macschema - Toolchain for generating JSON definitions of Apple APIs
qtalk-go - versatile stream IO and RPC based IPC stack for Go