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Show HN: I made a tool to HTTPS your localhost
It's been 4 month since I work on Lokal full-time, I finally feel confident to share it publicly on YCombinator.
Lokal is a software for Tunneling, Local Development, and HTTP Debugging, It's support HTTP, TCP and UDP Tunnel.
The different with other tunneling solution is that Lokal has mDNS support with https enabled by default, while other might be only offer public-facing tunnel service.
On the latest version 0.3.0, Lokal support Self-hosted Lokal Tunnel Server, which allow you to use your own domain and your own VPS, allow you to have Premium but self-hosted Tunneling Solution.
Download -> Lokal.so/download
Self-hosting Tutorial -> https://docs.lokal.so/lokal-server/installation/ https://docs.lokal.so/lokal-server/installation/
- terryds 2y agocongrats on the launch!
- _f9cu 2y ago[flagged]
- cwt137 2y agoThis product seems similar to Ngrok and some other solutions. How does this product differentiate itself from everyone else?
- rubi1945 2y agoHi, I make detailed comparison on excel about this question https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzvPRA2ZK5ekSaTV5vyrwYITyJC7AELCKFlPt-sSukU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzvPRA2ZK5ekSaTV5vyr... basically ngrok's traffic inspection is only available by last month, right, they are old player but pretty late on shipping things. also, we had an AI Assistant.
- PenguinCoder 2y agoPlease share this information in a non Google, non Microsoft format. Perhaps make it a plain HTML page or PDF and link it directly from your primary website.
- rubi1945 2y agoI see, thank you for your suggestion Here I made temporary image version (basically screenshotting the google sheet) https://download.lokal.so/vendor-comparison.png https://download.lokal.so/vendor-comparison.png
- ramon156 2y agoHaving a .local suffix doesn't really seem like a feature. Also, I still don't see why this is better than ngrok. If anything, I'd turn it down because there's functionality (an AI assistant) that I don't want.
- PenguinCoder 2y agoThanks.
- peterldowns 2y agoCongratulations on the launch! How does the remote -> local tunneling work? The docs you linked are a little unclear to me. How does this differ from something like Localcan, which seems to offer the same features? https://www.localcan.com/ https://www.localcan.com/ For what it's worth, I'll mention that I have an open-source application, Localias [0], that does the same local https development + mDNS support for HTTP/TCP/UDP traffic. Localias doesn't support traffic inspection or remote -> local tunneling, but it's open source, built on caddy, and works on mac/linux/wsl2. It's a statically built binary and you can share your configs with your whole dev team in your git repo. [0] https://github.com/peterldowns/localias https://github.com/peterldowns/localias
- rubi1945 2y agohi, I do have make premium comparison here with another vendor: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzvPRA2ZK5ekSaTV5vyrwYITyJC7AELCKFlPt-sSukU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzvPRA2ZK5ekSaTV5vyr...
- rubi1945 2y agoit is indeed has .local address, but does it have built-in auth plugin? request and response manipulation?, AI Assistant, JSON debugging capabilities and even the File Preview feature?, I don't think they can compete with Lokal right now
- brrrrrm 2y agoWhy not just self sign a local cert? Its really easy to do (ask an AI for a relevant example in your language of choice)
- rubi1945 2y agoyes, sure thing it's really easy to do and makes your focus changed on making local https working instead of building your real product https://chatgpt.com/share/9cc6ab14-e777-45a6-92b8-c58bbfb433ab https://chatgpt.com/share/9cc6ab14-e777-45a6-92b8-c58bbfb433...
- bavell 2y agoYep, this is what I do using mkcert [0] and it works great. One-time setup of 15m to install certs on your dev devices. [0] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert
- corytheboyd 2y ago+1 for mkcert. You can juggle all the openssl dance moves if you want, it’s a decent learning exercise. After you’ve done that once though, and if you only need it for local dev… yeah just use mkcert
- johnklos 2y agoOr why not just use a real cert? Getting a wildcard cert is trivial, as is creating a locally resolving DNS record for your local machine. For tunneling, how is this different / better than ssh -L?
- rubi1945 2y agoI don't think real certificate provider could work with .local mDNS address as they need to do some public verification going on the second answer is, ssh -L are just pretty slow on concurrent request, I might think it's just bloat as there is so much thing happen on ssh that not required for tunneling, also it doesn't do vhost natively as on Lokal you can just choose which domain you want to use, and it's just works...
- asadhaider 2y agoShouldn't the watchtower docker config be configured to only monitor and update the lokal-server container and not every container on the host? WATCHTOWER_LABEL_ENABLE env set to true on watchtower com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable label set to true on lokal-server
- rubi1945 2y agoyou are correct, appreciate it for the report , I will change the docs on self hosted deployment.
- radeeyate 2y agoWhat all can the "AI Assistant" do?
- rubi1945 2y agoI want it to be able to receive command to resend and modify a request but I will never get it into launch if all I thinking is to add more features so currently it's only providing related information of inspected request to the chat session, so our user don't manually copying context again to a chatgpt or similar.
- rcarmo 2y agoWon't this break Bonjour/Zeroconf .local announcements from hosts? Should you be using .local at all?
- rubi1945 2y agono sir, the default .local are still accessible on Macbook, you could check General > Sharing > scroll the bottom and you will see something like RUBIs-MacBook-Pro.local, and it's still working.
- ptspts 2y agoAfter looking at your web page and your HN post for 1 minute each, I have no clue what your software is doig, where it is running, whether it is open source, how much a subscription costs etc. It's also confusing to me that the title says HTTPS, the post says HTTP. The use of HTTPS in the HN post title as a verb makes it incomprehensible for me. Are you planning an HTTPS-basef network attack on the computers of all HN users? Probably not. But then why do you suggest it in the title? Why not write a title which is easy to understand, using common verbs?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rubi1945 2y agopardon me for my bad english, english was not my native language and yet I forgot to use AI to correct my title basically the title only say 10% of what this software can do, the other feature as visible on Lokal.so site people might call it ngrok alternative, well it could, but ngrok doesn't have features like Lokal's do so what's this software basically do is: Share: your localhost with Public and https .local Address Debug: What's Incoming, Replay without triggering real WebHook Develop: further with AI Assistant help! if you still don't understand about what this software could do, I'm afraid I'm running out of word to explain this on your-own terms. appreciate it
- rty32 2y agoYou forgot the "AI Assistant help" part. I was actually interested in the tool, but closed the page as soon as I saw this. I don't need any AI from a tool that "gives me HTTPS on localhost". If I need AI Assistant, I know where to go. Thanks.
- rubi1945 2y agoI'm sorry If any of my narration makes you misunderstood the AI did not give you https on localhost the AI only assisting based on your question
- zuzuleinen 2y agoGreat video!
- rubi1945 2y agothank you :) I'm trying to record my self talking while operating something on my computer, I give up after 20+ retake, and end up pivoting to this kind of video.
- pxue 2y agoToo. many. features
- rubi1945 2y agoI have some Anxiety feeling if the product being too few features.
- jmull 2y agoLooks good. I've been using Cloudflare's thing ("tunnel", I think) for the basic functionality, but I see this does additional things. If I ever want to do those things (or I just decide I want to try something different) I'll keep this in mind.
- mrzool 2y agoYou lost me at "AI assistant help".
- difosfor 2y agoIntriguing, but I think VS Code's built in GitHub tunneling support is enough for me.
- efilife 2y agoThe page is blank for me. Fennec on android
- ghoshbishakh 2y agoCongratulations! We all know how difficult it is to launch a working product. Looks like you are trying something similar to what we do at https://pinggy.io/ https://pinggy.io/ LAN-Wide Accessible .local address looks like a super useful feature!