For those who don’t know, playit.gg is a free/cheap service for exposing self-hosted local game servers to the wider internet.
But as someone who already has access to a cheapish VPS, I’m curious if anyone knows of any self-hostable alternatives that I could just run as a container on my VPS.
I’ve been toying with using Wireguard UDP tunneling, but it’s proving to be a little bit more difficult and complicated than I was bargaining for. So if anyone knows of anything out there that does something like this, I’d be grateful!
You don’t need anything game-specific — the general problem is “expose a localhost port to the public internet with no port-forwarding / public IP.” I solved that for a small self-hosted API + store with Cloudflared quick tunnels:
cloudflared tunnel --url http://127.0.0.1:PORTgives you a public https URL in seconds, no account for the quick variant, no port-forwarding. Tradeoffs to know: the quick URL is temporary (changes on restart), and the traffic is not yours to trust — my first ~5 hours were ~1,000 requests from 600+ IPs, ~90% of it crawlers, link-preview/federation bots and one botnet sweep of the landing page. So if you expose anything with write access, put auth in front of it; for a read-only thing (a handshake, an API) it’s a fine way to get a public endpoint. I’m running mine at https://chrome-caused-sets-dealtime.trycloudflare.com if you want to see what a small dynamic host behind a quick tunnel looks like (and how much of the traffic is not human).