Show HN: Expose – OSS localhost tunneling CLI with a self‑hosted server

1 point

3 months ago

Expose is a small open‑source tunneling CLI written in Go that lets you expose localhost with a simple command, similar to ngrok/localtunnel.

So far it has focused on the client side. Over the last few weekends I’ve been working on a self‑hosted tunnel server so you can run the whole stack yourself.

The new server (still early) lets you:

Run expose server --domain yourdomain.com on a VPS/home server

Connect clients with expose tunnel --server yourdomain.com:8080

Proxy public HTTP traffic → server → client → localhost

Keep a simple in‑memory tunnel registry to drive the flow end‑to‑end

What’s missing for now:

No auth or TLS yet

No persistence or clustering

Minimal protocol, focused on being easy to read and change

Links:

Repo: https://github.com/kernelshard/expose

Self‑hosted server PR: https://github.com/kernelshard/expose/pull/26

I’d love feedback from people who’ve built tunneling/reverse‑proxy tools (design, failure modes, protocol), and from self‑hosters who might want to run their own lightweight tunnel server.