What is a Reverse Tunnel?
Understand how Reverse Tunnel works and why you need it for local development.
Imagine building a website on your local laptop (http://localhost:3000). Normally, your laptop lives behind a home or office router, hidden from the internet. Outside services like Stripe webhooks, GitHub notifications, or your teammates cannot reach your computer.
A Reverse Tunnel creates a secure, encrypted pipe from inside your computer outward to our cloud server. Anyone on the internet can visit your custom URL (https://username-3000.quickshelf.online), and our cloud proxy automatically routes the traffic straight down that pipe directly into your local dev app!
Get an instant SSL-encrypted domain without editing router settings or buying domain certificates.
Inspect incoming webhook payloads from Stripe, GitHub, Twilio live, and replay them with 1-click.
Your URLs are deterministically scoped to your GitHub handle so nobody can steal your tunnel names.
If your Wi-Fi drops, the CLI uses exponential backoff to automatically reconnect in milliseconds.
Key Terminology Dictionary
- Control Server (WSS)
- The WebSocket server managing active tunnels and heartbeats.
- Proxy Server (HTTP)
- The edge proxy that receives internet traffic and routes it to the CLI.
- API Key (tk_...)
- Your 51-character authentication token generated from the dashboard.
- Traffic Inspector
- The dashboard tool for viewing and replaying HTTP requests.