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Quickstart tutorial

This tutorial shows you how the inlets client and server components work together, using your laptop to run both parts of the tunnel.

  • On the exit-server (or server)

Start the tunnel server on a machine with a publicly-accessible IPv4 IP address such as a VPS.

Example with a token for client authentication:

export token=$(head -c 16 /dev/urandom | shasum | cut -d" " -f1)
inlets server \
  --port 8000 \
  --control-port 8001 \
  --token "${token}"

A note on security:

inlets OSS doesn't enable any form of encryption for its control-plane, so you can upgrade to inlets PRO or do this yourself with a separate reverse proxy.

Note down your public IPv4 IP address.

  • Head over to your machine where you are running a sample service, or something you want to expose.

Run a HTTP server like Python's built-in HTTP server:

mkdir -p /tmp/inlets-test/
cd /tmp/inlets-test/
touch hello-world
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
  • On the same machine, start the inlets client

Start the tunnel client:

export EXIT_SERVER_IP="192.168.0.100"
export UPSTREAM="http://127.0.0.1:8000"

export CONTROL_PORT="8001"
inlets client \
 --url ws://$EXIT_SERVER_IP:$CONTROL_PORT \
 --upstream=$UPSTREAM \
 --token=$TOKEN

Note the warning you receive about using ws:// instead of wss://, then add --insecure if you understand what this means and want to continue testing.

  • Replace the --url with the address where your exit-server is running inlets server.
  • Replace the --token with the value from your server

We now have three processes:

  • example service running (hash-browns) or Python's webserver
  • an exit-server running the tunnel server (inlets server)
  • a client running the tunnel client (inlets client)

Now connect to the tunnel using the data-port 8000 and the server's IP:

echo Browse your files at: http://$EXIT_SERVER_IP:8000

You can change the data-port from 8000 to 80, however if you wish to serve traffic to clients over the Internet, you will need to configure TLS for the server using a separate reverse proxy.

See also:

A personal license for inlets PRO can be used at work and at home. It can configures encryption for you using TLS, without the need to install any additional software.