Finch – local port forwarding | Hacker News Reader

Finch – local port forwarding

meetfinch.com

126 pointslachgr54 comments

Looks pretty similar to ngrok, aside from the fact that ngrok has an unrestricted free tier.

(Looks like ngrok.com is down at the moment: http://web.archive.org/web/20140504031732/https://ngrok.com/ )

My first thought too. Ngrok's traffic inspection stuff is pretty cool, and it doesn't look like Finch has that.

Vagrant Share is also a similar idea, though obviously tied to Vagrant.

Ngrok looks cool, too. The traffic inspection tool sounds really great. It's a pity it's website is down now. If this often happens it's pricing may be good, but maybe are other services better alternatives if you can't always you Ngrok.

I know Alan and have been using Ngrok for months now. This is the first time I've noticed a seriously long outage. The site seems to be back up now, FWIW.

ngrok is amazing and open.

do these support sni/https correctly? Last time I checked localtunnel/ngrok, it did not. Pagekite does.

When it's not down, like now or most of the time. :(

I used ngrok pretty heavily a couple months ago for a period of weeks and it never never down when I was using it. This is the first time I've ever seen ngrok (service or site) down.

It looks also very similar to Localtunnel (https://localtunnel.me), except that Localtunnel is free and open source, so that you can run it on your own server. But Finch seems to be a little more user-friendly (easy forwarding of url's, for example).

ngrok is open-source too: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok

And that localtunnel.me is a Node.js "port" of the original localtunnel (which has been superceded by ngrok): https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel

Or Anvil, which runs flawlessly and super simply. http://anvilformac.com/

Also completely free.

Also sort of like xip.io

xip.io doesn't tunnel anything, it just creates convenient DNS records.

Anvil is a great tool for making sites accessible on the local machine and local network, but it does nothing to make your sites accessible from the Internet, especially if you're behind a NAT or a dynamic IP. Finch and the other mentioned services here do, so it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

EDIT: typo

You can pay for ngrok though (I don't believe there was a price forced, rather donate any amount (pay-what-you-want service as he states it). And the sites not being online currently might probably have to do with inconshreveable (the author) updating it, as he stated in a tweet recently.

Also, I'm not sure but did ngrok provide the endpoint over ssl?

Yep, ngrok provides SSL endpoints for everyone automatically.

I might just be unlucky, but the few times in the past where I've tried to use either ngrok or localtunnel - they've been down.

It's important to know that your content, intellectual property, and possibly confidential user data including full http request/responses are being proxied by this service. Their privacy policy is vague about what they will do with this information other than to say they will collect and process it:

https://meetfinch.com/privacy

"In running and maintaining our website we may collect and process the following data about you:

Information about your use of our site including details of your visits such as pages viewed and the resources that you access. Such information includes traffic data, location data and other communication data. Information provided voluntarily by you. For example, when you register for information or make a purchase. Information that you provide when you communicate with us by any means."

I think that all of these type of services are able to access your content. Maybe the don't do so, but unless you run this on your own server, your data is in principle accessible by the service.

Agreed. Just want to point it out to those that jump in head first without understanding the consequences of that action. You might get fired from your job for doing this or severly reprimanded. You might unwittingly cause a production data breach for some reason you never even imagined. So it's a message of be careful and understand fully what you are doing.

    ssh -R 80:localhost:8080 ubuntu@some-ec2-instance -i key.pem

This has been my technique for a long time. I usually add -N, since there's usually no need to do anything on that host.

You'd need to tweak the server for this to actually work. By default, remote forwarded ports are not accessible from other hosts, and non-root cannot listen on port 80.

http://serverfault.com/a/133440/1726 http://serverfault.com/a/285617/1726

Or give everything an ipv6 address and just use DNS. Once you get accustomed to every VM and every container and every little experiment having a routeable IP address life gets easier.

Would you happen to know of any good tutorials for this? Are you talking about using something like Docker?

What exactly is your workflow?

Thank you.

Allocate a /64 to any machine that runs VMs or containers. Then I tend to just run radvd which will broadcast the prefix so that hosts can auto assign; for virtual hosts letting them auto assign based on mac address is usually fine, as the mac address is random or you assign explicitly (explicit is often easiest). Its fairly simple, just get ipv6 and start using it...

Getting accustomed to allowing public access to development services doesn't sound like a good idea.

You would normally have to explicitly unfirewall any service; I run my ipv6 as inbound ssh only. Although crawling ipv6 is pretty hard compared to ipv4.

If you're using vagrant v1.5+, there's vagrant share: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/share/.

Requires a vagrantcloud account, free during beta: https://vagrantcloud.com/

But that's limited to Vagrant, with services like Finch any port can be forwarded (though Vagrant Share has more options like ssh).

I think it's good to see some competition in this field as these services can only become better.

I want to jump in here and officially say that Vagrant Share in its current form will likely be free forever.

Awesome, that's good to hear!

Its crazy the data people will hand over to total strangers for the promise of a little convenience.

Looks like http://proxylocal.com/ (and others), but implemented in Node.js ?

Would be interesting to see a chart & timeline of similar services and products reimplemented each time a new tech comes around...

http://john-sheehan.com/blog/a-survey-of-the-localhost-proxy...

I guess I need to update this now.

If you're updating it, could you note that the PageKite client and server are open source?

https://pagekite.net/wiki/OpenSource/

Adding now

Huh. And here I figured Finch was command-line pidgin. What happens when names collide in open source world?

Basically one of either outcomes happen: 1. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and one project gets renamed. Users are happy. Packagers are happy.

2. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and neither compromise. Users of both projects (intersection of the sets, rather than union) are pissed. Packagers are even more pissed, and put in an annoying and difficult situation, and forced to come out with weird hacky solutions to appease users. (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614907)

To any of you who read this and find yourself naming a project in the future, do your users some justice and at least do some cursory Googling before settling on a name. And please don't pick annoying-to-Google names like + or * or - or _ or some other one- or two-character name.

The name looked familiar... then I realized, there's multiple Finches. https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch

Some of the subdomain URLs it creates are pretty hilarious. I got https://massive-boys.usefinch.com/

As yet another alternative Runscope Passageway https://www.runscope.com/docs/passageway

It's a crowded space :) http://john-sheehan.com/blog/a-survey-of-the-localhost-proxy...

How is it different from Pagekite? (Apart from requiring node.)

FWIW, if you just want to forward a port you can run:

    natpmpc -a 9077 9000 tcp 36000

which will forward 9077 to 9000 for 3600 seconds.

Mac user (or at least Airport Express)? NAT-PMP is a competitor to uPNP which is more likely to be implemented on a consumer grade router.

http://v2.nat32.com/upnpc.htm

It looks like the upnpc and natpmpc apps are in the same package though.

Yeah, I came across `natpmpc` when I discovered the Airport Express at the office does not support uPNP. Our new Asus N66U supports NAT-PMP so I thought maybe it was more common these days.

It would be nice to make a upnp version of this for when you're on the same network, you just don't want to mess with finding your ip

This looks cool but I couldn't imagine putting a development concept through someone I don't know's server.

You appear to have 10 hours of traffic a month right now, while it's in beta:

https://meetfinch.com/pricing

Once they roll out paid plans, their 20 hour/month plan is $15/month. And (at least based on their pricing page now) you don't get reserved subdomains until the $25/month option, so you end up getting a random URL whenever you set a site up (again).

I’ve been using Finch for quite a while now, and I absolutely love it. As a lot of people have pointed out, there are several alternatives and/or competitors. But, as @lachgr points out, Finch is very user-friendly, which—to a designery type like me—is invaluable.

I've made the trip from localtunnel to pagekite to ngrok.. Ngrok is the greatest of all time. Being able to intercept, modify and replay is a life safer when debugging webhooks.

https://ngrok.com

Good there's competition though.

Like I said for the last one of these, your own VPS or server plus 2 lines of Nginx config plus ssh -R gets you the same thing with no additional dependency. And you control the domain name.

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