Localtunnel: Quickly expose your local web server to the Internet

I inadvertently hit someone else's server when refreshing XXXX.localtunnel.com that I had left open in my browser (but since closed my tunnel). That was annoying.

Two suggestions:

1) Randomly assign subdomain names instead of reusing existing ones.

2) Increase the length of the subdomain from 4 characters to 6 characters. With 4 characters, each being a-z0-9, there are 36^4 subdomain possibilities. 36^6 would make it much more difficult to locate an active subdomain through trial and error.

36^4 = 1,679,616

36^5 = 60,466,176

36^6 = 2,176,782,336

I've used localtunnel quite a bit for quickly sharing a local dev server with a coworker and other things of that nature, but I noticed that after leaving a tunnel open for a while I would see requests from unfamiliar IP addresses.

It turns out this is because localtunnel reuses tunnel ids. Given how small the id space is, it's also possible that there are people who scan localtunnel URLs looking for interesting servers.

Keep this in mind before using localtunnel for anything you don't want the world to see.

An alternative way i've used to test Twilio till now is get a DynDNS account and point it to my home laptop. Infact my home router has a DynDNS option to fill in my username/password, so it can query the latest external domain assigned to it. This is useful if you're on a DHCP and don't have a static IP.

You get a domain like blah.ath.cx that you can use.

Nice work, but doesn't this do exactly the same thing as https://showoff.io/ does? And they linked it here a month or so ago I think. [1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467107

Nice. But isn't it time to just get yourself an IPv6 tunnel, and then be able to share anything that runs over the Internet instead of just one port? Then you can use the normal IP routing and access control machinery instead of having to roll your own.

I was at the San Diego Ruby meetup group two weeks ago where one of the Twilio developers was on hand doing some demo work with the API. He was using this to tunnel the API / http calls through the firewall back to his local machine. Very impressive.

Wow! That's amazing! It actually works.

Major Kudos to Twilio! Thank you. I'll be using this quiet often.

Anyone building this in python?

What are the bandwidth limits on this service?

could this be used for minecraft servers?