aequitasetveritas / inlets-heroku-tutorial

Run inlets on Heroku to tunnel local endpoints for free

inlets-heroku-tutorial

Run an inlets server on Heroku.

inlets is a service tunnel and reverse proxy. It can be used to punch out local endpoints to another network, or the Internet.

See inlets/inlets on GitHub.

Deployment

In order to run inlets on Heroku, you can use the container image facility and then set an auth token using Heroku's environment variable store. There is no need to rebuild the whole container from scratch, just inherit the official image and override the CMD.

Push a container image

• Log into your dahsboard, create an app and get the CLI:

https://dashboard.heroku.com

• Login:

heroku container:login

• Deploy:

heroku container:push web -a my-inlets
heroku container:release web -a my-inlets
heroku restart web -a my-inlets

• Set auth token

export TOKEN=$(head -c 16 /dev/urandom | shasum | cut -f1 -d" ")
echo "Token is: ${TOKEN}"

export HEROKU_APP=my-inlets

heroku config:set TOKEN=${TOKEN} --app $HEROKU_APP
echo $TOKEN > token

• Run a test server

mkdir -p /tmp/inlets
cd /tmp/inlets
uname > README.md
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

• Connect the inlets client

export HEROKU_APP="my-inlets"

inlets client \
  --remote wss://${HEROKU_APP}.herokuapp.com \
  --token $(cat token) \
  --upstream http://127.0.0.1:8000

• Now test the tunnel:

https://${HEROKU_APP}.herokuapp.com/