Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared)

Free Cloudflare-native local-to-public tunnel for webhook testing — no card, no quota

Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared)

Role

Exposes a localhost:<port> server on the user’s machine to a persistent public *.oriz.in hostname so that external webhook senders (Razorpay, GitHub, Bluesky AT Protocol firehose, EmailOctopus, etc.) can reach the in-flight Worker / site during development.

Picked over ngrok / localtunnel / serveo on free-tier persistent hostname + same-vendor + zero-card grounds — see decisions/architecture/local-dev-tunneling-cf-tunnel.

Free tier

• Unlimited tunnels per Cloudflare account
• Persistent hostnames bound to any zone on the account (dev.oriz.in, dev-blog.oriz.in, etc.) via cloudflared tunnel route dns
• Unlimited bandwidth + connections for personal / dev use
• No anonymous-session TTL — cloudflared tunnel run dev-oriz survives laptop reboots; reconnects automatically after network blips
• Cross-platform binary: Windows (winget / scoop / direct download), macOS (brew), Linux (apt / yum / direct), Docker

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free as part of any Cloudflare account. The family already has a Cloudflare account for Cloudflare Pages, Workers, DNS, Email Routing, and WAF — cloudflared adds zero new vendor surface.

Use shape

# One-time setup per developer machine
winget install cloudflare.cloudflared          # Windows
brew install cloudflared                        # macOS
cloudflared tunnel login                        # browser-auths into the CF account
cloudflared tunnel create dev-oriz              # mints tunnel UUID + creds.json
cloudflared tunnel route dns dev-oriz dev.oriz.in   # binds hostname

# Per-session — point dev.oriz.in at whichever local port
cloudflared tunnel run --url http://localhost:8787 dev-oriz

Or via ~/.cloudflared/config.yml for multi-route ingress:

tunnel: dev-oriz
credentials-file: ~/.cloudflared/<UUID>.json
ingress:
  - hostname: dev.oriz.in
    service: http://localhost:8787    # Worker dev
  - hostname: dev-blog.oriz.in
    service: http://localhost:3000    # Astro site dev
  - service: http_status:404

cloudflared tunnel run dev-oriz then routes both hostnames in parallel.

Why this is our pick

• Same vendor as the rest of the stack — Cloudflare account already exists for Pages / Workers / DNS / Email / WAF; one more daemon, no new vendor surface.
• Free + no card — fits rules/no-card-on-file and rules/no-subscriptions.
• Persistent hostnames — dev.oriz.in survives laptop reboots, network changes, and IP changes. ngrok’s free tier rotates hostnames every session, forcing webhook re-registration every dev day.
• No anonymous-session TTL. Sessions are bound to the account-credentials file, not throttled.
• CDN-edge encryption — traffic flows over Cloudflare’s edge to the local daemon; no ngrok-style public-tunnel inspection layer.
• OSS — cloudflared source at cloudflare/cloudflared; Apache-2.0.

Alternatives

• ngrok — free tier rotates hostname every session; persistent hostnames require paid plan + card. Anonymous use throttled. Rejected per local-dev-tunneling-cf-tunnel.
• localtunnel — random loca.lt subdomain, no *.oriz.in binding, OSS but unmaintained.
• serveo — SSH-tunnel-shaped; no *.oriz.in binding; reliability uneven.
• bore / frp / pagekite — self-host or paid past tiny envelope; the family runs only managed serverless.
• Tailscale Funnel — fits internal collaboration (receiving party needs Tailscale installed); doesn’t fit public-internet webhook senders.

Swap cost

Low — cloudflared is one binary + one config file. Swapping to a hypothetical alternative is changing the start script in each repo’s package.json. Webhook URL re-registration cost depends on the sender (Razorpay UI, GitHub repo settings) but is a one-time per-sender lift.

Quota / failure modes

• No request quota for personal / dev use — Cloudflare’s free Tunnel tier doesn’t cap bandwidth or connections.
• Daemon crash — cloudflared restarts; tunnel UUID and DNS binding are durable on the CF side.
• Account-level limits — large numbers of named tunnels (>1000) may attract a soft cap; family scale uses one named tunnel per developer machine.
• Production traffic stays off tunnels — production hits Cloudflare’s edge directly via Pages / Workers; tunnels are exclusively a local-dev surface.

Security posture

• Credentials file (~/.cloudflared/<UUID>.json) is the bearer secret — never committed, never shared. If leaked, run cloudflared tunnel delete dev-oriz and recreate.
• Tunnel hostname is publicly resolvable — but only your daemon serves it. When the daemon is offline, the hostname returns a CF “tunnel offline” page.
• Don’t tunnel anything you wouldn’t want hit from the public internet. Treat dev.oriz.in as if it were production while the tunnel is up.

Cross-refs

• Local dev tunneling decision
• Wrangler — local Worker dev
• Dev-tools index
• Cloudflare DNS — hosts the *.oriz.in zones bound to tunnels
• Cloudflare Workers — primary tunnel target during dev
• Hookdeck — production webhook ingress, used after dev verification
• No card-on-file rule

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