Cloudflare has introduced a simple way to make a local application accessible from the Internet – without opening ports, configuring DNS or setting up a server.

With Cloudflare Quick Tunnels, you can run:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000

and instantly get a public HTTPS URL such as:

https://random-name.trycloudflare.com

This is especially useful when developing web applications, testing webhooks, sharing work in progress with teammates, or connecting external services to a local environment.

There is no Cloudflare account required for Quick Tunnels, making them particularly convenient for quick, temporary development environments.

Cloudflare isn’t the first company to offer this kind of workflow. Tools such as ngrok, LocalTunnel, Tunnelmole and localhost.run provide similar ways of exposing local services through a public URL. What makes Cloudflare interesting is how naturally this fits into its broader developer platform and Cloudflare Tunnel ecosystem.

For developers, it’s another example of infrastructure becoming almost invisible: instead of configuring networking, you can simply start your local app, run one command and share the URL.

Localhost → public HTTPS endpoint → done.