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Show HN: Pipenet – A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel (pipenet.dev)

114 points by punkpeye ↗ HN
Hey HN!

localtunnel's server needs random ports per client. That doesn't work on Fly.io or behind strict firewalls.

We rewrote it in TypeScript and added multiplexing over a single port. Open-source and 100% self-hostable.

Public instance at *.pipenet.dev if you don't want to self-host.

Built at Glama for our MCP Inspector, but it's a generic tunnel with no ties to our infra.

https://github.com/punkpeye/pipenet

9 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 24.5 ms ] thread
oakesm9
Would this be able to support TCP and UDP in the future?
lizimo
Cool website! Did you use any web framework or just plain HTML/CSS?
Trufa
Nice, just today, I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier, but I'm interested in knowing is there something architecturally hard or expensive with having fast traffic?

I love this and will definitely try it.

I would honestly love to have it with a dockerized version with something like caddy that manages ssl so I can basically just run a docker command have it up and running.

Thank you very much! Great stuff will give it a try.

wahern
PipeNet is also the name of the scheme independently invented by Wei Dai contemporaneously with USNRL's Onion Routing: http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt Onion Routing is what Tor is based on. I'm not sure if the original Tor author(s) knew about PipeNet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were familiar.

PipeNet was conceived in 1996 (https://cryptome.org/jya/pipenet.htm), before the USNRL work was made public in 1997 (IIRC), so definitely independent, in as much as these things are ever truly independent. Both are derivative of Chaum Mixes (1979), which had become popularized as anonymous e-mail remailers in the 1990s.

P.S. Not a comment about project name clashing, just thought it would be interesting to point out. Wei Dai's PipeNet is all but forgotten these days. But I had came across it (on sci.crypt?) before stumbling on the Onion Routing web page.

evgen
Sherman, set the wayback machine....

Definitely a blast from the past. One of the things that made PipeNet very interesting compared to its contemporary peers (e.g. onion routing) was that it used fixed size pipes with constant traffic. An observer would be unable to know when traffic was being sent down the pipe so correlation attacks become significantly more difficult. Pair it with some probabilistic encryption like Blum-Blum-Shub and you can party like a late 90s cypherpunk.

kxbnb
The multiplexing over a single port is a nice touch - solves the random port allocation pain point that makes localtunnel tricky to deploy in restrictive environments.

Curious about the WebSocket overhead in practice. Have you measured latency compared to SSH-based tunnels like bore or rathole? The TypeScript/node.js stack makes it easy to embed, which is appealing for dev tooling integrations.

The fact that you built this for MCP Inspector work is interesting - I've been working on MCP tooling myself and the local dev workflow definitely needs better tunneling options. Nice to see more infrastructure pieces for that ecosystem.