caddy-tutorial.md

Tutorial

Run Caddy on your local machine and obtain TLS certificates served from your computer, as if it had a real, public IP.

Scenario: You want to share a file such as a VM image or a ISO over the Internet, with HTTPS, directly from your laptop.

Setup your exit node

Provision a VM on DigitalOcean or another IaaS provider.

Log in with ssh and obtain the binary:

curl -SLsf https://github.com/inlets/inlets-pro-pkg/releases/download/0.4.3/inlets-pro-linux > inlets-pro-linux
chmod +x ./inlets-pro-linux
mv ./inlets-pro-linux /usr/bin/inlets-pro

Find your public IP:

export IP=$(curl -s ifconfig.co)

Confirm the IP with echo $IP and save it, you need it for the client

Get an auth token and save it for later to use with the client

export TOKEN="$(head -c 16 /dev/urandom |shasum|cut -d'-' -f1)"

echo $TOKEN

Start the server:

sudo inlets-pro server \
  --auto-tls \
  --common-name $IP \
  --remote-tcp 127.0.0.1 \
  --token $TOKEN

Setup your DNS A record

Setup a DNS A record for the site you want to expose using the public IP of the exit node

• 178.128.40.109 = share.example.com

Setup Caddy 1

• Download the latest Caddy binary from the Releases page - on a VPS you want a binary with a name like caddy_v0.11.5_linux_amd64.tar.gz. (you can use wget https:// to download the file.)

• Uncompress the tar.gz file: tar -xvf caddy_v0.11.5_linux_amd64.tar.gz

• Create a Caddyfile replacing share.domain.com with your own DNS record:

share.domain.com

proxy / 127.0.0.1:8000 {
  transparent
}

Start the Caddy binary, it will listen on port 80 and 443.

Run a local server to share files

mkdir -p /tmp/shared/
cd /tmp/shared/

echo "Hello world" > WELCOME.txt

# If Python version is 3.x
python3 -m http.server

# Or use this for 2.x
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Start the inlets-pro client on your local side

For a Linux client

curl -SLsf https://github.com/inlets/inlets-pro-pkg/releases/download/0.4.3/inlets-pro-linux > inlets-pro-linux
chmod +x ./inlets-pro-linux
mv ./inlets-pro-linux /usr/bin/inlets-pro

For a MacOS client

curl -SLsf https://github.com/inlets/inlets-pro-pkg/releases/download/0.4.3/inlets-pro > inlets-pro
chmod +x ./inlets-pro
sudo mv ./inlets-pro /usr/bin/inlets-pro

Run the inlets-pro client:

export IP=""        # take this from the exit node
export TOKEN=""     # take this from the server earlier
export LICENSE=""   # your license

sudo -E inlets-pro client \
  --connect wss://$IP:8123/connect \
  --tcp-ports 80,443 \
  --token $TOKEN \
  --license $LICENSE

Check it all worked

Now visit https://share.example.com

Congratulations, you've now served a TLS certificate directly from your laptop. You can close caddy and open it again at a later date. Caddy will re-use the certificate it already obtained and it will be valid for 3 months. To renew, just keep Caddy running or open it again whenever you need it.