Show HN: Pipenet – A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel

Posted by punkpeye 4 hours ago

Show HN: Pipenet – A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel(pipenet.dev)

Hey HN!

localtunnel's server needs random ports per client. That doesn't work on Fly.io or behind strict firewalls.

We rewrote it in TypeScript and added multiplexing over a single port. Open-source and 100% self-hostable.

Public instance at *.pipenet.dev if you don't want to self-host.

Built at Glama for our MCP Inspector, but it's a generic tunnel with no ties to our infra.

https://github.com/punkpeye/pipenet

66 points | 11 comments

ollybee 3 hours ago|

Add it to the list https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

punkpeye 3 hours ago|

That list is where my research started! Was surprised not to find a pure node.js solution that's easy to self-host and has CLI/SDK.

Added https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling/pull/214

Trufa 1 hour ago||

Nice, just today, I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier, but I'm interested in knowing is there something architecturally hard or expensive with having fast traffic?

I love this and will definitely try it.

I would honestly love to have it with a dockerized version with something like caddy that manages ssl so I can basically just run a docker command have it up and running.

Thank you very much! Great stuff will give it a try.

punkpeye 1 hour ago|

You might need to define 'fast'.

This should not add more latency than your average VPN, since the overhead of websocket is minimal and roundtrip time is about the same.

At the moment, this is running on a single-instance with no load-balancing. The intended use case was to enable streaming of MCP SSE traffic, which is very lightweight. I would expect this to be able to handle a lot of traffic just like that, but if people start using the public instance for other use cases, I will need to think of ways to scale it.

punkpeye 1 hour ago||

I am keeping one eye on how this is scaling.

At the moment there are 5 active tunnels and CPU is at 2%.

I would therefore expect that this can scale quite a bit before it becomes some sort of bottleneck.

Who knows though – maybe I am underestimating the demand. Didn't expect this to get to the front page of HN.

lizimo 2 hours ago||

Cool website! Did you use any web framework or just plain HTML/CSS?

punkpeye 2 hours ago|

Just plain HTML/CSS.

I did this morning in a rush. Didn't expect anyone to compliment it. Thank you!

oakesm9 3 hours ago|

Would this be able to support TCP and UDP in the future?

qudat 1 hour ago||

There are other tunneling solutions that support both and https, websockets using ssh tunnels for the communication. For example I use https://tuns.sh which is a managed sish instance

punkpeye 48 minutes ago||

Indeed, there are more mature solutions. The primary reason I made Pipenet is because I needed something that can be embedded in Node.js client.

punkpeye 3 hours ago||

The current implementation is HTTP-focused as that was the primary use case. TCP tunneling is possible architecturally but not something I've had in mind. I suggest start by raising an issue on GitHub and adding thumbs up. If it receives enough attention, I will prioritize it. I am less familiar with what would supporting UDP entail, so cannot answer that right now.