/surang-server

Self-hostable WebSocket based tunneling solution to expose your localhost 🚀

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

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A self-hostable WebSocket based tunneling solution to expose your localhost. 🚀


This is Surang server repository. Check out surang for client installation.

Surang allows you to expose your localhost server to the world through WebSocket based one-to-one tunnel. Surang is created to be easy to host on most of the hosting platforms that support NodeJS (read more at How is Surang different from localtunnel? ).

Server requirements:

  • Surang uses WebSocket connection to tunnel the traffic, hence hosting platform needs to support WebSocket communication with NodeJS.
  • Though not mandatory, having https & wss support is recommended. (if not possible, Surang client can be configured to use http & ws.)

Steps to host your Surang server:

  • Clone or Download the server code from this repository.

  • Follow NodeJS server hosting instructions for your respective cloud platforms.

  • Surang server uses PORT & AUTH_KEY environment variables, you will need to set these on your server dashboard.

    • PORT: This port will be used to listen with express server on it. Most cloud platforms like Heroku configure this variable by default to proper TCP port.

      If not defined, server will use 7000 port by default.

    • AUTH_KEY: You can set this to be any secret string. This will be used by server to authenticate incoming client connection. Once defined on server environment, you will also need to configure the same secret key on your Surang client as mentioned here. AUTH_KEY is essential to prevent someone else from using your Surang server.

      If not defined, server will treat all clients as unauthorized. This is intentionally done so, to avoid skipping AUTH_KEY setup.

One click hosting on Heroku:

Click the button below to host latest version of Surang server on Heroku.

Deploy

Use the same AUTH_KEY that you configure on Heroku in your Surang client.

(Note: PORT will be auto-configured by Heroku.)

Once server is up, install and configure your Surang client to match server configuration as instructed in client's README.

Running server on local machine:

Install all dependencies with yarn install and then run:

yarn start

This starts server on PORT defined in environment variable or 7000.

You need to configure AUTH_KEY in your local environment variables.

(You can also create .env file in root directory of server to define PORT & AUTH_KEY as per dotenv standard.)

How is Surang different from localtunnel?

'localtunnel' is great. It's open-source, free, supports multiple clients at once, and you can host your own localtunnel server too. Unfortunately, localtunnel uses TCP connections over non-root TCP ports. This can be troublesome if you want to host your own server, as most of the cloud platforms with free tiers don't give this much freedom to us (and our servers). On the other hand WebSockets are now widely supported on cloud hosting platforms.

(PS: I got inspired to write this library, when I realised that localtunnel can not be hosted on Heroku's free tier.)

  • localtunnel uses TCP connections, surang uses WebSocket connection to do the trick.
  • localtunnel cannot be hosted on platforms which don't support it's requirements, surang should be easier to host as WebSockets are widely supported nowadays.
  • localtunnel allows multiple client connections with single server, surang doesn't (yet). Everyone is supposed to host their own surang-server.
  • localtunnel is mature and has great community, surang is in early phase and might not work for all types of requests yet.
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