inletsctl

Conceptual diagram

Case-study with receiving webhooks from https://blog.alexellis.io/webhooks-are-great-when-you-can-get-them/

Use-cases:

• Setup L7 HTTP and L4 TCP tunnels for your local services using inlets with inletsctl create
• Port-forward services your local Kubernetes cluster using inletsctl kfwd

Video demo

In the demo we:

• Create a cloud host on DigitalOcean with a single command
• Run a local Python HTTP server
• Connect our inlets client
• Access the Python HTTP server via the DigitalOcean Public IP
• Use the CLI to delete the host

inletsctl is the quickest and easiest way to automate both inlets and inlets-pro, whilst retaining complete control.

Features/backlog

Completed:

• Provisioner: DigitalOcean
• Provisioner: Scaleway
• Provisioner: Civo.com support
• Provisioner: Google Cloud
• Provisioner: Packet.com
• inletsctl delete command
• Add poll interval --poll 5s for use with Civo that applies rate-limiting

Pending:

• Provisioner: AWS EC2
• Enable inletsctl delete via --ip vs. instance ID #2
• Install inlets/inlets-pro via inletsctl download #12
• Enable inlets-pro and TCP with inletsctl kfwd #13

Related projects

Inlets is listed on the Cloud Native Landscape as a Service Proxy

• inlets - open-source L7 HTTP tunnel and reverse proxy
• inlets-pro - L4 TCP load-balancer
• inlets-operator - deep integration for inlets in Kubernetes, expose Service type LoadBalancer
• inletsctl - CLI tool to provision exit-nodes for use with inlets or inlets-pro

Install inletsctl

curl -sLSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/inlets/inletsctl/master/get.sh | sudo sh

Or

curl -sLSf https://inletsctl.inlets.dev | sudo sh

Windows users are encouraged to use git bash to install the inletsctl binary.

Costs for exit-nodes

See notes for inlets-operator

Examples for inletsctl create

Examples on how to run inletsctl to create an exit node.

Pre-reqs:

• You will need inlets on your client

Workflow:

• After running inletsctl create, the IP address of your exit-node will be returned along with a sample inlets client command, for instance:

  Inlets OSS exit-node summary:
    IP: 209.97.131.180
    Auth-token: qFyFzKYQvFSgtl7TM76p5SwWpmHaQGMT405HajiMzIYmwYVgJt1lvAMXfV4S3KlS
  
  Command:
    export UPSTREAM=http://127.0.0.1:8000
    inlets client --remote "ws://209.97.131.180:8080" \
          --token "qFyFzKYQvFSgtl7TM76p5SwWpmHaQGMT405HajiMzIYmwYVgJt1lvAMXfV4S3KlS" \
          --upstream $UPSTREAM

• You can delete your exit node using the id given by your cloud provider

  inletsctl delete --access-token-file ~/Downloads/do-access-token --id 164857028

Example usage with DigitalOcean

inletsctl create --access-token-file $HOME/Downloads/do-access-token \
  --region="nyc1"

Example with inlets-pro

Let's say we want to forward TCP connections to the IP 192.168.0.26 within our client's network, using inlets-pro, we'd run this using the --remote-tcp flag.

inletsctl create digitalocean --access-token-file ~/Downloads/do-access-token \
  --remote-tcp 192.168.0.26

Example usage with Scaleway

# Obtain from your Scaleway dashboard:
export TOKEN=""
export SECRET_KEY=""
export ORG_ID=""

inletsctl create --provider scaleway \
  --access-token $TOKEN
  --secret-key $SECRET_KEY --organisation-id $ORG_ID

The region is hard-coded to France / Paris 1.

Examples for inletsctl kfwd

The inletsctl kfwd command can port-forward services from within your local Kubernetes cluster to your local network or computer.

Example usage:

inletsctl kfwd --if 192.168.0.14 --from openfaas-figlet:8080

Then access the service via http://127.0.0.1:8080.

Contributing

Add another cloud provisioner

Add a provisioner by sending a PR to the inlets-operator's provision package, once released, you can vendor the package here and add any flags that are required.

Note: only clouds that support cloud-init can be added

License

MIT