An alternative to Dynamic DNS (DDNS) for your home server

If you set up you own web server at your home (e.g. you own a sweet Raspberry Pi), and want to make it accessible to the world (assuming your server is behind NAT), one common way of doing this (without purchasing a domain) is to set up a Dynamic DNS domain pointing to your server.

It simply works. However, there’s one tiny concern for me: by doing so, you expose your home router’s IP to the internet, this is sort of privacy leak besides a tiny security risk of being scanned for exploits, may not be a big deal but it’s something that I would bear in mind.

Recently I found an alternative to this and wish to share it here - localtunnel.me¹. It will provide you with a *.localtunnel.me subdomain without exposing your server’s actual IP. The way it does this is by tunneling traffics from/to your server. It supports https protocol which means you get a TLS certificate for free as well.

The setup is also quite straighfoward:

• Install NodeJS if haven’t done so
• Run (sudo) npm install -g localtunnel
• Run lt --port 80 --subdomain mycooluniquedomain (assume your http server runs on port 80)
• Visit your site at https://mycooluniquedomain.localtunnel.me and sit back

If it can be any help, here is my little script (called from /etc/rc.local) for auto starting localtunnel on boot:

#!/bin/bash

keepforking() {
  local cmd="$1"
  local slp=$2
  if [ "x$slp" == "x" ]
  then
    slp=60s
  fi
  while true
  do
    eval $cmd
    sleep $slp
  done
}

keepforking "/sbin/runuser -u www-data -- /usr/bin/lt --subdomain yourcooluniquedomain --port 80" 5m