Cloudflare Tunnel

Cloudflared is Cloudflare's lightweight daemon that creates secure tunnels between your local services and Cloudflare's global network without requiring public IP addresses or complex firewall configurations. Originally developed as part of Cloudflare's Argo Tunnel service, cloudflared establishes outbound-only connections that tunnel traffic through Cloudflare's edge network, eliminating the need for traditional port forwarding or VPN solutions. The daemon runs as a connector service that authenticates with Cloudflare's infrastructure using secure tokens and maintains persistent connections to route traffic to your internal applications. This Docker configuration deploys cloudflared as a containerized tunnel client that connects your local Docker network to Cloudflare's edge servers. The setup creates a secure bridge between your internal services and the internet, routing all traffic through Cloudflare's global network with built-in DDoS protection, SSL termination, and traffic filtering. Cloudflared handles the complex networking automatically, establishing multiple redundant connections to ensure high availability and performance. This stack is ideal for developers running homelab environments, system administrators managing internal tools, and organizations requiring secure remote access without exposing infrastructure directly to the internet. The containerized approach provides isolation and portability while maintaining the security benefits of Cloudflare's Zero Trust architecture, making it valuable for teams needing secure access to development environments or internal applications.