beams

Beam your localhost to the world — free, friendly, for everyone.

Run beams in your project and your dev server is on the internet: it finds the port, opens a public https://*.trycloudflare.com URL, copies it to your clipboard and prints a QR code so you can open it on your phone. Free forever, no signup — it auto-downloads what it needs on first run.

Install

# Run instantly, no install (npm package is published as "beams-cli")
npx beams-cli

# Or install globally — the command is `beams`
npm i -g beams-cli      # then:  beams

# Or build from source
cargo install --path .

The npm package is named beams-cli because beams was already taken on npm, but the command you run is always beams.

Usage

beams                            # find the dev server on the usual ports and share it
beams 3000                       # random HTTPS URL via Cloudflare (default)
beams http://localhost:8080      # explicit URL

beams 3000 --open                # also open the public URL in your browser
beams 3000 --subdomain myapp     # fixed subdomain -> https://myapp.loca.lt (localtunnel)
beams 22 --tcp                   # raw TCP (SSH, databases, …) -> bore.pub:PORT (bore)

Press Ctrl+C to stop. Notes:

• With no argument, beams probes 3000, 5173, 8080, 8000, 4200, 5000, 1313 and 4321 and takes the first port that is actually serving.
• It checks your local port before opening the tunnel, so a link that would 502 fails immediately instead of on your visitor's screen.
• The public URL is copied to your clipboard automatically.
• If the relay drops the tunnel, beams reconnects and prints the new URL.
• The default Cloudflare URL is random and changes each run; quick tunnels take a few seconds to become reachable.
• --subdomain names are first-come on the shared loca.lt server.
• --tcp gives you a random bore.pub port for any TCP service.
• Dev servers (Vite, etc.) work out of the box — beams rewrites the Host header to your local localhost:PORT.

How it works

beams dials out to a relay that assigns a public address and forwards traffic back to your localhost — no inbound ports, no account, no cost. It wraps three free backends and downloads what it needs on first run:

• Cloudflare Quick Tunnel (default) — random *.trycloudflare.com HTTPS URL
• localtunnel (--subdomain) — chosen *.loca.lt subdomain
• bore (--tcp) — raw TCP via bore.pub

Roadmap

• v0.3 — bring-your-own domain; config file for multiple tunnels
• later — background daemon

License

MIT