What is Octoporty?
Octoporty is a self-hosted reverse proxy tunneling solution. It allows you to expose services running on a private network to the public internet through a secure WebSocket tunnel.
Think of it as a self-hosted alternative to ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnels - but you control everything.
Why Octoporty?
Privacy First - Your traffic never passes through third-party servers. You control the Gateway, the Agent, and everything in between.
No Subscription Fees - Deploy once on your own infrastructure. No monthly costs for tunneling services.
Full Customization - Open source means you can modify, extend, and integrate with your existing systems.
Architecture
Octoporty consists of two main components:
-
Gateway - Deployed on a server with a public IP address (e.g., a cloud VPS). It receives incoming HTTP/HTTPS requests and WebSocket connections, routing them through the tunnel.
-
Agent - Deployed inside your private network. It maintains a persistent WebSocket connection to the Gateway and forwards requests to your internal services.
The tunnel uses WebSocket with MessagePack binary serialization for efficient, compressed data transfer. Both HTTP requests and WebSocket connections are forwarded end-to-end, enabling real-time applications like chat, live dashboards, and development servers with hot reload.
Technology Stack
Backend:
- .NET 10
- FastEndpoints (API framework)
- Entity Framework Core (SQLite)
- SignalR (WebSocket management)
- MessagePack (binary serialization)
- Serilog (structured logging)
Frontend:
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS 4
- Vite
Infrastructure:
- Docker (chiseled images)
- Caddy (reverse proxy + auto HTTPS)
- GitHub Container Registry