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Tunnel My ...

Wordpress

Wordpress is configured to run under a specific URL, usually http://localhost. This is excellent for local development but not for being on the internet.

Follow the instructions at https://wordpress.org/support/article/changing-the-site-url/ to set the URL of your wordpress installation.

tip

Free domains change after a period of time and are not recommended for Wordpress due to Wordpress's lengthy URL update procedure.

If you will primarily be developing Wordpress sites please consider a Custom Domain plan from https://admin.localhost.run. This will give your tunnel a stable domain name which you only need to configure once.

caution

If you want to use Wordpress with a free domain you can explore https://wordpress.org/plugins/relative-url/ and setting WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], but please pay attention to the warnings on the relative-url plugin.

Favourite Web framework

If you see requests going to localhost:{your locally running apps port} in your browsers dev tools when browsing your site through localhost.run check your framework for reverse proxy settings.

More information can be found in the faq.

SSH servers

With a custom domain plan it is possible to tunnel to a SSH server using stunnel on the SSH client.

  1. On the SSH server make sure your localhost.run tunnel is connected:

    ssh -R tunnel.example.com:80:localhost:22 plan@cd.localhost.run

    This must be running to connect to SSH from your client computer.

    The rest of this guide is for the client computer.

  2. Install stunnel on your client SSH computer.

    stunnel is an application that wraps TCP, like SSH, in TLS.

  3. Configure it to wrap connections to localhost:2222 in TLS and send them to your custom domain by creating a file named stunnel.conf

    stunnel.conf
    foreground = yes
    pid = ./stunnel.pid
    [lhr]
    client = yes
    accept = localhost:2222
    connect = tunnel.example.com:443

  4. Run stunnel stunnel.conf in a terminal. This command must be running to connect to SSH.

  5. Run ssh localhost -p 2222 to connect over the tunnels to your SSH server.