Expose your local server to the public internet instantly

When building and testing web applications, you often need to share your local development server with others—whether for client demos, webhook testing, or collaborative debugging. That's where pipenet comes in.

What is pipenet?

pipenet is a tunneling tool that creates a secure connection between your local machine and the public internet. Run a single command, and you'll get a public URL that forwards traffic directly to your localhost.

npx pipenet client --port 3000

Within seconds, you'll have a URL like https://happy-dolphin-42.pipenet.dev pointing to your local server.

Localtunnel

pipenet is built upon localtunnel. We're grateful for the foundation it provided.

However, the original localtunnel codebase had grown stale. pipenet modernizes it with:

TypeScript throughout for type safety and better developer experience
ES Modules instead of CommonJS
Modern Node.js APIs and updated dependencies
CORS support out of the box for browser-based clients
Custom headers support for authentication and tracking
Self-hostable server included in the same package

Why We Built It

At Glama, we needed a reliable way to connect local MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to remote clients. MCP enables AI assistants to interact with external tools and data sources, but testing these integrations locally was cumbersome.

pipenet solved this by allowing developers to expose their local MCP servers securely, enabling real-time testing with remote AI clients without deploying to production.

This capability is now integrated into mcp-proxy, making it even easier to bridge local MCP servers with cloud-based AI services.

Get Started

Install pipenet and start tunneling:

# Expose local port 3000 npx pipenet client --port 3000 # Or run your own server npx pipenet server --port 3000

Check out the project on GitHub.