Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

rathole – ngrok alternative

Published on 2022-04-03 in 💭 Thoughts

Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/5a1

⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.

Some time ago I tried to make my Nitter instance available on the Internet from home via Tailscale, Caddy and an own building block in between, but stopped it again a short time later because it didn’t work that well somehow. Today I found out about rathole, and what can I say? It works great and seems to be much faster than my previous solution!

So now I can not only make Nitter accessible on the go without Tailscale, but also for example my Baikal instance, which I use for calendar and contact synchronization. I’m even considering hosting Miniflux or other non-critical self-hosted services this way from home. After all, I can save (rented) server resources and eventually scale my VPS back down some time.

I came across rathole via yesterday’s Hacker News discussion on ngrok alternatives. I’m sure there are some more alternative solutions in the thread.

Tags: Selfhosting

Interactions & Comments

Jan-Lukas Else PicoShare – simple file sharing Having recently posted about rathole, today I’d like to share another tool I use in combination with rathole: PicoShare. Sometimes I might want to briefly share a file with someone, like a PDF scan of a letter, pictures or whatever. Some people send files via email, sometimes I send them via Telegram, but sometimes I just send a link to OneDrive. But somehow it’s all not optimal: the email with attachment fills up the space in the usually space-limited inbox or is rejected directly by the mai…
- Vít Skalický :manjaro: @en for one time file sharing there I use e2e encrypted service wormhole.app which also uses webtorrent to boost download of very large files
- Alexander If we're talking minimalism (and Go, of course), https://viric.name/cgi-bin/filegive/doc/trunk/doc/home.wiki has you covered. With `filegive theFile`, you get a one-time URL (also printed on console as QR code) for downloading the file. With `filegive -R`, you can receive files. Don't trust the ephemeral self-signed certificates? Supply your own CA certificate with `-ca`. There's also some options for NAT traversal which never worked for me (networks are cursed, see https://xkcd.com/2259/) bu…
- Jan-Lukas Else Mein April ‘22 im Rückblick Auch der April ist nun rum, Zeit einen kurzen Rückblick zu wagen. Das Wetter im April war ziemlich gemischt. Zum einen hat es direkt am Anfang des Monats ein bisschen geschneit, Mitte bzw. Ende des Monats war es dann aber schon deutlich wärmer, bis mehr als 20° C. Frühling halt, aber Frühling ist glaube ich tatsächlich meine Lieblingsjahreszeit. Anfang des Monats habe ich ein paar Open-Source-Tools geteilt, die ich spannend finde: rathole, ntfy und PicoShare. rathole und ntfy haben ihre Diens…
- Jan-Lukas Else My April ‘22 in Review April is also over now, time to take a short look back. The weather in April was quite mixed. On the one hand, it snowed a bit right at the beginning of the month, but by the middle or end of the month it was already much warmer, up to more than 20° C. Spring, but I think spring is actually my favorite season. At the beginning of the month I shared a couple of open source tools that I find exciting: rathole, ntfy and PicoShare. rathole and ntfy have proven their services by now, only for Pico…
Jan-Lukas Else Mein April ‘22 im Rückblick Auch der April ist nun rum, Zeit einen kurzen Rückblick zu wagen. Das Wetter im April war ziemlich gemischt. Zum einen hat es direkt am Anfang des Monats ein bisschen geschneit, Mitte bzw. Ende des Monats war es dann aber schon deutlich wärmer, bis mehr als 20° C. Frühling halt, aber Frühling ist glaube ich tatsächlich meine Lieblingsjahreszeit. Anfang des Monats habe ich ein paar Open-Source-Tools geteilt, die ich spannend finde: rathole, ntfy und PicoShare. rathole und ntfy haben ihre Diens…
Jan-Lukas Else My April ‘22 in Review April is also over now, time to take a short look back. The weather in April was quite mixed. On the one hand, it snowed a bit right at the beginning of the month, but by the middle or end of the month it was already much warmer, up to more than 20° C. Spring, but I think spring is actually my favorite season. At the beginning of the month I shared a couple of open source tools that I find exciting: rathole, ntfy and PicoShare. rathole and ntfy have proven their services by now, only for Pico…
Jan-Lukas Else Another change in my infrastructure setup: I replaced rathole with Chisel. There wasn’t any particular reason, I use it in the same way: It’s making a few services and websites hosted on my home server available on my VPS to publish using Caddy and a static IP. Chisel is just a bit more simple to configure using command line flags. And it’s written in Go.
- Jan-Lukas Else My cheap alternative to Ngrok Since GoBlog has an Auto-HTTPS feature that can automatically retrieve HTTPS certificates via ACME from e.g. Let’s Encrypt, I need a public IP address with which I can reach my test instance of GoBlog via port 80 and 443. So far I’ve been using my ISP’s IP address for this, luckily I don’t have any problems with CGNAT or similar, so I just need to change my daily changing IP address via DynDNS and open the ports on my router. But I’m not sure if I want to keep this setup forever, because I mi…