Expose your dev machine to the public via reverse SSH tunnel

Scenario: you are creating a REST service which needs to be exposed to the public even in early stage of development due to an upstream provider which sends back feedback data from a webhook API.

You are also behind a NAT so you’d have to port forward yourself out but you can’t do that for whatever reason. Or maybe you are behind a firewall and 7 proxies.

All you need is an external server with a public IP. Then, on your machine:

ssh -R 0.0.0.0:8080:localhost:8080 server_user@public_server_ip

In the above example, I used port 8080 which my REST service uses when I develop. On your public server, make sure you have

GatewayPorts yes

in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. If it is missing, add it.

And that’s it.. your local REST service is now publicly accessible via public_server_ip:8080.

a-m-a-z-i-n-g

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