Cloudflare Tunnel: Expose Your Home NAS and Raspberry Pi to the Internet for Free

Cloudflare Tunnel (formerly Argo Tunnel) is the best free way to expose your local network services to the public internet. You don’t need a public IP address, and you don’t need to set up port forwarding on your router — you can have it up and running in about five minutes.

What Is Cloudflare Tunnel?

By running the cloudflared daemon on your local machine, Cloudflare Tunnel establishes an encrypted tunnel between your device and Cloudflare’s edge network, letting anyone on the public internet reach your local services through your domain name.

Installing cloudflared

Windows

Download the installer from https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/releases

macOS

Linux

Log In and Create a Tunnel

Here’s an example config.yml:

Configure DNS

Start the Tunnel

Typical Use Cases

• Remote access to your NAS (Synology, QNAP)
• Raspberry Pi services
• HomeAssistant smart home automation
• Game servers
• Debugging a development environment