Home Tunnel

Simple port tunneling using Deno Deploy as a free serverless hosting for the relay station.

Three components:

• Local client running on the host system
• Relay server hosted on Deno Deploy relaying data between local client and remote client
• Remote client running on the remotly machine accessing the forwarded port on the local host system

Example

Setup Relay Server

• Create a Playground server on Deno Deploy
• Add your costum configuration to the generic Management Panel of the Relay Server

import {serve} from "jsr:@psytrap/home-tunnel-relay"
import { OAuth2Client } from "jsr:@cmd-johnson/oauth2-client@^2.0.0";


const USER_ID = parseInt(Deno.env.get("USER_ID") ?? "-1"); // https://api.github.com/users/<your_github_user_name>
const HOST: string | undefined = Deno.env.get("HOST"); // my-subdoman.deno.dev
const CLIENT_ID: string | undefined = Deno.env.get("CLIENT_ID") ?? "<Client ID>";
const CLIENT_SECRET: string | undefined = Deno.env.get("CLIENT_SECRET") ?? "<Client Secret>";
const APP_KEY = Deno.env.get("SECRET_COOKIE_KEY") ?? crypto.randomUUID(); // random alphanum

const REDIRECT_URI = `https://${HOST}/oauth2/callback`;
const oauth2Client = new OAuth2Client({
clientId: CLIENT_ID,
clientSecret: CLIENT_SECRET,
authorizationEndpointUri: "https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize",
  tokenUri: "https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token",
  redirectUri: REDIRECT_URI,
  defaults: {
    scope: "read:user",
  },
});
const PORT = 80;

await serve(PORT, APP_KEY, oauth2Client, USER_ID);

• Setup an OAuth app in your GitHub account https://github.com/settings/developers
• Configure the five environment parameters in the settings menu of the Playground

Setup Local Client

• Download binaries for your host system architecture
• Run from terminal

home-tunnel --relay <URL for your relay server> --port <e.g. 22 to forward SSH>

• For persistance install it as a system service with port 22 as default

sudo install_service.sh <URL for your relay server>

• Check status of service with

systemctl status home-tunnel.service

or (exit by pressing 'q')

sudo journalctl  home-tunnel.service -f

Run Remote Client

• Download binaries for your remote machine architecture
• Run from terminal and mirror port

home-tunnel --relay <URL for your relay server> --port <e.g. 22222>

• In another terminal use SSH

ssh -p 22222 <user on local system>@127.0.0.1

• ssh-copy-id might help increasing password security

Kown Issues

This is a very basic solution so far and has several uncritical issues.

• Sometimes Deno shutsdown instances leaving dead local client connection. An hourly idle connection reset has been implemented.
• No communication when conneting to data center with different regions.
• Only the local client has good error handling to ensure survivablity. Restart remote client and relay server when observing issue.

Alternatives

Tunneling

• Cloudflare Tunnel
• ngrok
• localtunnel
• frp
• bore
• tunnelto
• rathole

Reverse Proxy

Proxies are another way to tunnel specifically HTTP traffic.

• Caddy

Release plan

• Version: home-tunnel.ts, git tag, deno.json
• Check staging relay server
• Try RasPi binary + Linux binary from GitHub
• Nightly run with RasPi
• Final release on GitHub + Publish on JSR