Awesome
What?
UPDATE: You might be best served by mesh VPN like Tailscale (or WireGuard), they can even expose subnets.
This is a standalone binary for creating a semi-persistent (client tries its best to detect errors, use keepalives and do reconnects) SSH reverse tunnel.
You can use the native OpenSSH server as a server, or function61/holepunch-server which brings some fancier optional features like purely-over-HTTP operation.
Failed connections are automatically retried and includes a helper to add this service to system startup (Systemd).
Usage
Download a suitable binary (we support Linux/AMD64, Linux/ARM and Windows/AMD64) for you from the download link.
First, generate a keypair for you:
$ ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 521 -C "my awesome private key" -f id_ecdsa
Copy content of id_ecdsa.pub
to your SSH server's authorized_keys
file.
Write holepunch.json
(see holepunch.example.json).
You can use this with a vanilla SSH server, but if you're using
function61/holepunch-server, you can also
connect via WebSocket if you use format like ws://example.com/_ssh
as server address
(or wss://
for https).
If you use holepunch-server, the default username is hp
, but it can be overridden
(see the server documentation).
Run client:
$ ./holepunch connect
To exit, type Ctrl + c
for graceful stop.
To make holepunch automatically start on system startup (and restart on crashes):
$ ./holepunch write-systemd-file
Wrote unit file to /etc/systemd/system/holepunch.service
Run to enable on boot & to start now:
$ systemctl enable holepunch
$ systemctl start holepunch
$ systemctl status holepunch
How to build & develop
How to build & develop (with Turbo Bob, our build tool). It's easy and simple!
If you prefer to not install Turbo Bob, standard Go build commands work (instructions here).
Credits
Hugely inspired by codref's gist