Most customers connect their origin to Cloudflare by setting a DNS record that points to the IP address of their origin server. Exposing an external IP to the Internet is not only a hassle, it can also be a security risk when done incorrectly.
If you want to prevent attacks to an exposed IP address, you need to configure access control lists to restrict who can reach the ports on your origin
If you change your IP address, you have to change your DNS record configuration
One year ago, Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Tunnel to solve these problems. Cloudflare Tunnel connects your origin server to the Cloudflare network by running a lightweight daemon on your machine that only makes outbound calls to Cloudflare for your hostname. You can restrict all ingress to the machine and Cloudflare Tunnel will do the rest. The connection also uses our Argo Smart Routing technology to find the fastest path from your visitors to your origin.
We’re excited to make Cloudflare Tunnel the best way to connect to Cloudflare, so we want to provide more people with a way to try it out. We built a new tool, TryCloudflare, that you can use to serve requests from a web server through a randomly-generated subdomain of tryCloudflare.com.
How can I use it?
Install Cloudflared on your web server or laptop; instructions here. If you have an older copy, you’ll first need to update your version to the latest (2019.4.0)
Launch a web server.
Run the following terminal command to start a free tunnel.
Cloudflared will begin proxying requests to your web server; no additional flags needed.
$ Cloudflared tunnel
The command above will default port 8080, but you can specify a different port with the --url flag
$ Cloudflared tunnel --url localhost:7000
Cloudflared will generate a random subdomain when connecting to the Cloudflare network and print it in the terminal for you to use. This will make whatever server you are running on your local machine accessible to the world through a public URL only you know. Even better it’s totally free and doesn’t even require having a Cloudflare account!
What are some good use cases for it?
Create a web server for a project on your laptop that you want to share with others on different networks
Test browser compatibility for a new site by creating a free Cloudflare Tunnel and testing the link in different browsers
Run speed tests from different regions
Why are we giving something away for free?
We want more users to experience the speed and security improvements of Cloudflare Tunnel (and Argo Smart Routing). We hope you test it with TryCloudflare and decide to add it to your production sites.
Cloudflare’s best features historically require you to own a domain, set that domain’s DNS to Cloudflare’s nameservers, and configure its DNS records before you can begin to use any services. We hope to make more and more of our products available to trial without that burden.
We don’t guarantee any SLA or uptime of TryCloudflare - we plan to test new Cloudflare Tunnel features and improvements on these free tunnels. This provides us with a group of connections to test before we deploy to production customers. Free tunnels are meant to be used for testing and development, not for deploying a production website.
What’s next?
This is a beta. We’re making it available to users, first come first serve, for 1,000 concurrent tunnels. We’re going to continue testing the tool before making it available more widely.
We’d love to hear about how you’re using it. Please send me any use cases or examples you have so we can share those with the community.
On your own domain using Cloudflare Access is a great Cloudflare Tunnel use case however… this is a test domain/ instance not directly controlled by your zone/ security. settings.
This is great, only thing I think could be improved is the Windows installation experience, having the option to install it via scoop and chocolatey would be great (edit: since they can add the exe to path, so you don’t have to manually add it yourself)
Barely noticed a latency different between the argo tunneled version and localhost version of the site I tested it on, love that websockets just works
No, if you want a static URL you need to buy the paid version. They won’t give everything away for free, they still need to run a business and pay for the service costs.
I’m attempting to test out Cloudflare Tunnel but am having an issue. Is it only designed to be used for HTTP(S) traffic?
When I run “.\Cloudflared.exe tunnel --url localhost:2541” on my Windows 10 machine I get "ERRO[0000] unable to connect to the origin error=“Get http://localhost:2541: EOF”
Can you limit access to the url further with some kind of password? Anyone with the url or visibility into the local network traffic can access the service.
I managed to set it up and get access to a web service running on my local network remotely. I do not need Argo Smart Routing but rather just Argo Tunnel. So far, it didn’t cost me anything.
I wonder if this service is permanently free or I’m missing something? I didn’t even have to enable Argo on my free account. Argo that should contain Tunnel and Smart Routing is mentioned to cost 5$/month+usage. But on the contrary, it didn’t cost me anything to enable.
TryCloudflare is free, but it is however only meant for users to try Argo tunnels.
TryCloudflare is sometimes used for testing experimental features before it’s used for production Argo tunnels, so it’s definitely not recommend to use this in production, as it’s not backed by any SLA or uptime guarantees.
In the end it does not cost anything to use TryCloudflare, but you’ll have to ask yourself if the potential downtime/bugs are worth it for using it with your web service.
Thanks for the swift response. I don’t remember using/seeing TryCloudflare either. I directly registered my domain with Cloudflare website and installed the cloudflared daemon on my system and after authenticating, and a few other simple steps, it was online.
Was I using their try version implicitly? Also on the Cloudflared dashboard’s traffic panel, it says “Enabling Argo activates Argo Smart Routing and Tiered Caching”. I was confused if Argo paid service covers only Routing and Tiered Caching while the Tunnel is there by default.
