Description
Showing a teammate or client something you built locally, or pointing a Stripe or GitHub webhook at your machine, usually means deploying first or signing up for a tunnel service, copying a token, and making visitors click through a warning page. hostc takes one npx hostc@latest 3000 and your local port gets a public HTTPS URL, with no sign-up and no binary to download.
It is built for front-end work: WebSockets pass straight through, so Vite and Next.js hot reload updates every device the moment you save, and requests arrive addressed to localhost so no allowed-hosts setting needs changing. The URL survives network drops and server restarts by reconnecting on its own. The server is an open source Cloudflare Worker you can also run on your own domain.
Nothing to set up: No account or auth token. If you have Node.js, npx runs it.
No interstitial: Visitors land directly on your app, not a warning page.
Hot reload works: WebSockets and Server-Sent Events stream through live to every open device.
Dev servers accept it as is: Requests look like localhost and redirects point back to the public URL.
Stable link: The URL stays the same through drops and server restarts, and --qr prints a QR code for phones.
Self-hostable: Deploy the tunnel server on your own Cloudflare account and domain and point --server at it.
It is built for front-end work: WebSockets pass straight through, so Vite and Next.js hot reload updates every device the moment you save, and requests arrive addressed to localhost so no allowed-hosts setting needs changing. The URL survives network drops and server restarts by reconnecting on its own. The server is an open source Cloudflare Worker you can also run on your own domain.
Features
Nothing to set up: No account or auth token. If you have Node.js, npx runs it.
No interstitial: Visitors land directly on your app, not a warning page.
Hot reload works: WebSockets and Server-Sent Events stream through live to every open device.
Dev servers accept it as is: Requests look like localhost and redirects point back to the public URL.
Stable link: The URL stays the same through drops and server restarts, and --qr prints a QR code for phones.
Self-hostable: Deploy the tunnel server on your own Cloudflare account and domain and point --server at it.
