You’re working on your latest revolutionary project that’s going to change the world (or not), but you need to show it to your team or external testers… The only problem is, your server is comfortably running on your local machine, and no one has access to it. This is where Portr comes in, like a white knight on a shining steed!
This tool allows you, through a tunneling solution, to expose local HTTP and TCP connections to the global internet \o/. And all this by using SSH remote port forwarding. Essentially, it creates a secure tunnel between your machine and a remote server, redirecting traffic to your local server.
Now, Portr is mainly designed for small teams who need to expose development servers on a public URL, so if you’re planning to use it to host the next Facebook, you might want to look elsewhere. But it does offer:
- Easy tunneling of HTTP and TCP connections
- An administration dashboard to manage teams and users
- Portr Inspector to analyze and replay HTTP requests
And if you want to see what it looks like in action, I’ve found 2 demo videos for you:
If you’re interested in trying it out, head over to the project’s GitHub repo. You’ll find everything you need to install and configure Portr. Oh, and I almost forgot (silly me…), Portr is open source and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0), so you can use, modify, and redistribute it as you like.
See you soon on Tech To Geek.
