How to create a tunnel using Cloudflare

Introduction

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a secure tunnel using Cloudflare to expose local services to the internet.

Prerequisites

• A Cloudflare account (free)

Step 1: Create a Tunnel in Your Cloudflare Profile

1. Log in to your Cloudflare account.
2. Navigate to the Zero Trust tab.
3. Go to the Networks section and select Tunnels.
4. Click Create a Tunnel.
5. Select Cloudflared as the connector.
6. Assign a name to your tunnel and save it.
7. If you haven’t installed Cloudflared, choose the first option. If you already have it installed, select the second option to paste it on the terminal.

Verify Your Cloudflared Installation

To know if you have the CLI installed correctly, type cloudflared --version in your terminal and this command should return the version of the installed CLI.

cloudflared --version

📌 You can follow the official Cloudflare documentation of how to install Cloudflare CLI

Step 2: Run the tunnel

Once your tunnel is created, you can expose your local service by running:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000

This will create a secure public URL that maps to your local service running on port 3000.

♥️ EXTRA: Create a custom alias to run directly + Real Example

If you frequently use Cloudflare tunnels, you can create a Bash alias to simplify the process:

alias tunnel='function _tunnel()
  { cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:$1; };
  _tunnel'

How it works

This alias allows me to run the tunnel directly from my terminal without having to type the full command every time.

Real Example

Imagine you have an Astro project running locally on port 4321 and you want to share it to your team.

Meanwhile in your laptop it’s running the Astro project on the port 4321, now you can run the following command on other terminal to create a tunnel:

tunnel 4321

This will create a Cloudflare tunnel and provide a public URL to access your project remotely 🤩.