Every public request to one of my sites used to go through a Cloudflare tunnel. I had a cloudflared deployment in my cluster, some routing rules, and everything just worked. And it was free! But that bugged me. TANSTAAFL right? The whole point of selfhosting is to not rely on big cloud company, and there are few bigger than Cloudflare. And Cloudflare’s tunnels decrypt every single packet, so they see everything you do. I really don’t like that.
So I’ve replaced Cloudflare tunnels with Erwan Leboucher’s towonel, a selfhosted tunnel implementation. I still have my DNS on Cloudflare, but no data is moving through them any more.
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I don’t get the need for those tunnels.
Wouldn’t a simple wireguard setup be enough un less you are behind CG-NAT?
Wireguard it’s there, free, open source, doesn’t rely on any external server or company…
What does these “tunnels” actually add?
Ease of deployment / time savings generally. You can certainly do it yourself with wireguard and a reverse proxy.
They are saying wireguard alone, no reverse proxy. No exposing any services at all to the outside, just tunnel in with WG and access locally.
Its a secure way to route the traffic from a public endpoint to your internal services without exposing your home IP address. You could do something similar with wireguard. I didn’t indicate you couldn’t.
It bundles WireGuard transport layer and a SNI reverse proxy natively, along with optional authentication. Good enough for beginners or people who need quick deployments.
That’s exactly the use case for “tunnels”: allowing public, incoming connections behind CGNAT.
Wireguard requires a public IP on at least one side of the connection and only allows private access. If you want to host a blog or website AND you’re behind CGNAT, then a “tunnel” service is a very easy solution.
Edit: my previous blog post on the topic: https://blog.k3can.us/posts/2025/feb/2025-02-21_cloudflarefort/
But going with a self-hosted approach like Towonel, you need a server with a public IP too. And I think what the commenter meant is, if you already have that, you can just setup a WireGuard connection to that public server, so that it can route the traffic to your local network.
Oh, maybe I misunderstood? It sounded like he didn’t understand what advantage a “tunnel” could provide.
If your server is behind CGNAT, you need a TURN-style “tunnel” to allow incoming connections. If you have your own remote server with a public IP, then you can absolutely use that and create the tunnel using wireguard (or openvpn, ssh, etc).
I just mentioned CF in my blog post because it’s probably the most popular solution.
The point is, if you have CGNAT, you need to create that “tunnel” somehow if you want to allow incoming connections.
yep, i used to use this behind a cgnat. being a broke kid i couldn’t have another machine with exposed ports proxy things
I checked and this does a similar thing. You can use WG to punch out a connection, and I have before. The linked program uses quic in a similar way to WG but doesn’t do any of the routing, just registers the connection to a hostname for application level forwarding.
It looks more that it provides an easy setup for an alternative.
Both methods can work on cg-nat as well since you are punching out.
One would be CG-NAT as you mentioned, and some people want to host for other people too, potentially including too many people/too distant/too tech illiterate to easily set up WG.
The benefit here is the software by design can’t read your traffic - it’s using SNI to route, not the host header, so SSL pass thru keeps the payload private. It’s billed as shareable for that reason.
Also this is open source and you can host it yourself.
Edit: I concede BakedCatboy’s point.
In either case I would probably just use FRP.
You missed my point?
why can’t you just use a wireguard connection between your device and the server, or network?
You mean putting your home servers on a VPN with your client devices? That wouldn’t really allow for exposing public services.
Thats the part right there. Its for not your device to access.
Like a self- hosted website/blog for example. Or taking the complexity of “start this before you try to connect to my eBook server” for your BIL, or “OK mom, when you want to watch the home videos I converted to digital you have to do it only from your phone, press this first, then share to your TV”.
That is the part I think you are missing. Use other than yourself and your own managed devices.
I use a wireguard tunnel as a reverse proxy and it does ssl passthrough with sni. Termination happens on my local box and the reverse proxy host doesn’t do any certs.
What reverse proxy are you using?
I use haproxy just for simplicity, with the https fronted in tcp mode with a tcp request inspect delay and acls using req_ssl_sni allows switching between multiple backend based on hostname, though if you only had 1 backend server then it could just be a raw tcp proxy. I have my stuff split between 2 local boxes that are both connected to the reverse proxy using wg so this works well for me.