Expose public URLs for wrangler dev

💡 Feature request

Enable public access of wrangler dev workloads.

Describe the feature

This feature request is the opposite of cloudflare/wrangler#1820 (and any other “run workers locally” requests): I love that wrangler dev runs workloads on edge servers, but it’s unclear if accessing those workloads publicly is possible. Being able to use those workers at an auto-generated, public URL would be ideal.

The specific use-case: most/all of my development work is not done locally, so exposing dev workloads on localhost is incompatible with the way I work across distributed services in the cloud and across providers. Even more specifically, I’d really like to be able to more easily work on workers that are themselves webhook endpoints for other services (like e.g. Stripe).

Describe the alternatives

My current workaround is to either publish the thing to a specific subdomain and then tail the logs or, more often, to spin up something like localtunnel to use as a temporary webhooks endpoint. The first solution is much slower than I expect an equivalent wrangler dev would be. The second solution is both cumbersome and somewhat silly conceptually, since wrangler dev is already tunneling from the edge to localhost and my tunnel is sending that data right back into the public realm through yet-another-network.

Skipping that extra hop altogether and enabling publicly-accessible workloads during dev would improve my Workers workflow considerably!

It’s also entirely possible that I’m mis-reading the documentation. If it’s already possible to access dev workloads publicly, then consider this a feature request for updated and clarified docs.

[threepointone]

Assigning this to myself, I want to work on this.

[isaac-mcfadyen]

A solution in the meantime for anyone who’s looking for one is to use Cloudflare Tunnel. There’s somewhat of a roundabout way to use a dashboard-managed Tunnel that can be activated on demand. Here’s instructions (make sure you install cloudflared first):

• Run cloudflared tunnel create NAME on your local device that you are testing on. If you skip this step and create a Tunnel via the dash you cannot activate on-demand (it’s always on), so make sure you create it this way. Pick a name and substitute NAME for your Tunnel name.
• Go to the Zero Trust dashboard, and find the Tunnel in the Tunnels menu on the right. Click Configure then Migrate (ignore all warnings, it doesn’t matter that your config will be lost because you don’t have any yet 😄).
• Add any hostnames you want under Public Hostnames, and point them to whatever local services you want (for example, laptop.example.com -> http://localhost:3000/)
• When you are ready to use your Tunnel, run cloudflare tunnel run NAME on your local device. Note that when this command is not running your Tunnel will not work: this helps protect against accidently leaving your Tunnel running and exposing a service by mistake.
• You can now access your local services on the Public Hostname you entered! 🎉