Cloudflared¶

Cloudflared is a tunnel client that allows you to expose services in your network through a secure tunnel with Cloudflare.

There is an official image for this service that we'll use: cloudflare/cloudflared.

Pre-Installation¶

We'll create a folder in the main user's home where all the service's data will be saved.

mkdir ~/services/networking/cloudflared

External Network¶

Since this service needs to interoperate with another one, we'll need to have them inside the same network. Make sure to have created the tunnel_external network before defining the docker-compose.yml file. If you haven't created this network, you can do so with:

docker network create tunnel_external

Creating a Tunnel¶

Before you can start the tunnel client, you need to acquire a token that will authenticate you to Cloudflare.

First, visit the following page: https://one.dash.cloudflare.com and log in to your account.

In the dashboard, click Networks > Tunnels and click the Create a tunnel button.

Select Cloudflared and click Next.

Name your tunnel and click in Save tunnel.

Select Docker as the environment and copy the command shown below. You'll notice this command shows a token inside, you should copy this value and continue by running your Docker Compose stack with this value set as the container's TUNNEL_TOKEN environment variable.

You should notice that when doing this, the webpage will update with the detected connector. If you see this, it means that your container is working perfectly. Finally click Next.

As you may have noticed, up to this point, the steps have been the same as the main server's Cloudflared service. However, since we already have a wildcard, set to the main server's tunnel, you should now create only the necessary routes. They still should point to http://traefik:8000.

Docker Compose¶

Cloudflared will be run using Docker Compose. The content of the docker-compose.yml file is as follows:

services:
  tunnel:
    image: cloudflare/cloudflared:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - default
      - tunnel_external
    command: tunnel run
    environment:
      TZ: America/Guayaquil
      TUNNEL_TOKEN: TUNNEL_TOKEN_HERE

networks:
  tunnel_external:
    external: true

Running¶

Start up the service with:

docker compose up -d

That's it! The service will auto-start on system startup and restart on failure.