Show HN: CRProxy is a simple and affordable ngrok alternative
crproxy.comCRProxy is a new reverse web proxy service.
We have a generous free plan that includes the ability to use custom domains and semi-custom sub-domains. We have reasonably priced plans with good bandwidth and no additional usage charges.
Please give it a try and let me know what you think.
Thank you,
David
There are many (always) free alternatives out there which you can find in a fairly comprehensive list at awesome-tunneling [0]. I'd caution anyone as there's always risk with downloading a no sources available binary as well, but this looks like it could be another good option!
My favorite two projects currently in the tunneling space are sish [1] and bore [2]. sish is more full featured and utilizes ssh for handling proxies (disclaimer: I wrote sish) while bore maintains a client/server but all sources are available for both. They're written in Go and Rust respectively. There's even a publicly accessible instance of bore running. You should submit a PR to include CRProxy in the awesome-tunneling list, I know Anders might do that as well as he's normally around these parts :)
[0] https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
[1] https://github.com/antoniomika/sish
[2] https://github.com/ekzhang/bore
Thank you for letting me know.
I understand the issue with a closed-source client. It wouldn't be trivial to open source at the moment, but maybe there's a path to do it in the future.
Sorry if it does not fit your business model, but in my opinion, it would be plainly stupid for anyone to download and run on his machine or server a closed source binary, especially when the goal is to give remote access through internet. And so that it is expected that this binary will open a direct pipe with the internet...
Literally any pre-compiled binary could do nefarious things... why make a big deal out of this one?
First, because if you are on a Linux distribution, you will tend to only take binaries from trusted sources like distribution repos that are imperfect but still audited and work on having reproducible builds.
Second because you can usually contained a closed source binary, let's say 'zoom' for example, but here the root goal is to open a pipe to the internet and give access to the console or local network, so it will be hard to check what it does and constrain it in normal operations.
Thank you for writing sish! We’ve been using sish as a self-hosted alternative to ngrok because of how easy and flexible it is to configure and because it allows us to tunnel to devices without installing any extra device-side software (since it uses ssh). I highly recommend it among all the other great projects on the awesome-tunneling list
Awesome, glad it’s useful! If there’s anything that could be better or weird issues, please do let me know!
Have to echo others: closed source, allowing internet access to my system, and unproven just doesn’t meet any minimum safe risk thresholds. I wish you luck, but the market is tight and being unable to assess code quality would be an absolute non-starter for my personal and professional buying decisions.
Personally I agree with your opinion. While we're open to code audits with clients, it's not a scalable solution. We'll consider open sourcing the client code.
I've rolled my own following this tutorial[0]. If you are into self hosting this is a great alternative. I am developing an app that a 3rd party site requires a redirect URL. Since my app is still in development and only running locally (and only when active developing) this is what I use.
[0]https://jerrington.me/posts/2019-01-29-self-hosted-ngrok.htm...
Nice, this is exactly simple enough for what I need. I used to really like ngrok, but I feel like it outgrew me. I'm loving this trend of minimal, focused projects.
Hi David, Just signed up. Emails are hitting spam/junk folder. Better to move your provider.
Interesting. I'm using mailgun and I've always had pretty good luck with them. I'll have to look into it.
Thank you for the report.
Also, not able to download the clients. https://crproxy.com/download/ links to 404 pages
Sorry, the repo was private. It should be fixed.
Hi again, the downloads for mac os requires signature :(
The Mac binary signing is something we completely overlooked. We'll have to look into it right away.
I am building something related.
Not for your local links or files but for your public webpages.
https://ablyhost.com
Looks nice, but what I would really like is a proxy service like this that would proxy inbound mail traffic in addition to web traffic so I can run my own mail server behind CGNAT.
I wonder if you can do that with ngrok's TCP tunnels?
No token! 10 minutes up
You may want to check your spam folder. We've had an issue with that already. Sorry for the inconvenience.
this is a very competitive market.
good luck