rathole-org/rathole

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: prerelease_only

Adoption not part of the score

14067 stars · 813 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

rathole is a lightweight, high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal written in Rust, exposing services behind NAT to the internet via a server with a public IP. It serves as a secure, low-resource alternative to frp and ngrok with mandatory tokens and optional Noise Protocol or TLS encryption.

Use cases

• expose a home server behind NAT to the internet
• self-hosted ngrok alternative for tunneling
• tunnel SSH or web services through a public VPS
• run tunnels on low-resource embedded devices like routers
• securely forward ports without a self-signed certificate
• replace frp with a faster, lighter reverse proxy

When to choose

• you need NAT traversal with a self-hosted public server
• you want lower memory and higher throughput than frp
• you need encrypted tunnels via Noise Protocol or TLS without certificate management
• you run on embedded or resource-constrained devices

When to avoid

• you need a managed service with zero server setup (use ngrok)
• you need a full HTTP reverse proxy with routing features (use nginx or Caddy)
• you need a mesh VPN rather than port forwarding (use Tailscale or WireGuard)

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

proxy networking security cryptography networking self-hosted developer-tools security windows cross-platform rust embedded nat-traversal reverse-proxy tunnel frp-alternative ngrok-alternative noise-protocol self-hosted-tunneling linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rathole-org/rathole")