Cloudflare Tunneling with Docker made easy with this handy guide from Bobcares.

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Service.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team is ready to help customers out with Cloudflare Tunneling with Docker

All About Cloudflare Tunneling with Docker

Let’s take a look at how to set up Docker for tunneling. Our Support Techs have come up with an easy guide to get the ball rolling. The process involves the following steps:

• Setting up Docker for tunneling
• Exposing a port to the internet
• Serving to a Domain Name using DNS
• Controlling tunnel processes

Setting up Docker for tunneling

We start out by installing a version of Docker in the main running process of the Linux server.

wget http://get.docker.io/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-master.tgz
tar -xf docker-master.tgz
sudo cp ./docker-master /usr/local/bin

Then, we run a docker as seen below:

sudo docker run --name mynginx1 -P -d nginx

As seen above, we are running docker via a sudo command. This is because permissions on the binary require admin access. Then we launch an Nginx container on the port with the default port running in detached mode where the name is mynginx1.

Exposing a port to the internet

In order to be able to interact with Cloudflare’s tunnel, we have to install the tunnel’s binary:

wget https://bin.equinox.io/c/VdrWdbjqyF/cloudflared-stable-linux-amd64.tgz
tar xvzf cloudflared-stable-linux-amd64.tgz

Next, we log in to the Cloudflare command-line interface:

./cloudflared tunnel login

Then we add the domain to the dashboard. After that, Cloudflare manages all the certs in a single file. Alternatively, we can also export the certs from Cloudflare’s dashboard. This leads to a dashboard command-line-tool link like the one below:

https://dash.cloudflare.com/argotunnel?callback=https%3A%2F%2Flogin.argotunnel.com%2FOJhbhPndjt5VYDrx3bVPZHu1TiSQ6Bk69KPlGWO7gSM%3D

It is now time to save all the certs to ~/.cloudflared/. Although Argo Tunnel can handle this automatically, we may have to manually export the cert for from Cloudflare’s dashboard if Argo Tunnel is missing.

Serving to a Domain Name using DNS

Our Support Techs suggest running a tunnel connected to a running docker container with Cloudflare’s origin proxy server and Free SSL with this command:

./cloudflared tunnel --hostname domainname.com http://0.0.0.0:5003

Here, we use command tunnel and binary cloudflared to set up a connection between an open port. Furthermore, the –hostname flag generates an AAA record to domainname.com which we can see in the Cloudflare dashboard.

Controlling tunnel processes

Linux offers great support in running long-standing processes in an instance’s background. Our Support Team recommends using GNU Screen to automate the long-standing tunnel from Cloudflare. For instance:

screen -S 'domainname.com' ./cloudflared tunnel --hostname domainname.com http://0.0.0.0:5003

We can close a screening process with this command:

screen -X -S "sessionname" quit

We can view a screening process with the following command:

screen -ls

After this process, we will have a docker container running on port :5003 in addition to a site running on the domain name domainname.com with https:// rather than http://

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Conclusion

To conclude, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated Cloudflare Tunneling with Docker.