cloudflare/cloudflared

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

15395 stars · 1409 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

cloudflared is the command-line client and daemon for Cloudflare Tunnel, which creates outbound-only connections from your origin servers to Cloudflare's global network. It proxies traffic from Cloudflare to your origins (HTTP, SSH, RDP, and other TCP protocols) without requiring open firewall ports or a publicly routable IP address.

Use cases

• expose a local web server to the internet without opening firewall ports
• replace a VPN with zero-trust private network access
• SSH into a home lab server behind NAT
• serve a self-hosted app through Cloudflare without a public IP
• proxy RDP or other TCP traffic through Cloudflare
• run a tunnel daemon in Docker to connect Kubernetes origins

When to choose

• you want to publish services behind Cloudflare without exposing origin IPs or ports
• you need outbound-only connectivity so your origin stays firewalled
• you want a VPN replacement for private network access via Cloudflare Zero Trust
• you need cross-platform binaries, packages, or a Docker image for deployment

When to avoid

• you need a tunnel without any Cloudflare account or domain on Cloudflare nameservers
• you want peer-to-peer tunneling independent of a vendor's network
• you need raw Layer 4 access without going through Cloudflare's edge

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

proxy networking security http-server ssh networking security self-hosted infrastructure-as-code windows cross-platform cli cloudflare-tunnel reverse-proxy zero-trust tunneling outbound-only vpn-replacement go devops linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cloudflare/cloudflared")