outpunch

Reverse WebSocket tunnel proxy. One Rust core, any framework, any language.

HTTP request → public server → WebSocket tunnel → private service

The core is a framework-agnostic Rust library — no web framework or WebSocket library dependency. Server adapters and client bindings are thin wrappers, not reimplementations.

Server adapters — axum, Vite, Express, Fastify, Rack, Rails

Client bindings — Rust, Python, Ruby

Windows: the Ruby gems are not supported on Windows yet. Other packages are tested on Windows.

Ruby gem names: install outpunch-ruby, outpunch-ruby-rack and outpunch-ruby-rails. Due to a clerical error we lost access to the RubyGems account that owns the original outpunch, outpunch-rack and outpunch-rails gems. We created those gems, and they are now orphaned at 0.1.x and will not get updates. If you have them installed, remove them before installing the new names, since both provide require "outpunch". If we recover the account, we'll move back to the original names. require paths and module names are unchanged.

Every package shares one version. outpunch-ruby ships precompiled for x86_64-linux (Ruby 3.1 to 4.0). On any other platform it compiles a Rust extension on install, so it needs a Rust toolchain (cargo).

import { outpunch } from 'outpunch/vite';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [outpunch({ secret: 'shared-secret' })],
});

let server = OutpunchServer::new(ServerConfig {
    secret: "shared-secret".into(),
    ..Default::default()
});
let app = outpunch_axum::router(server);

from outpunch import ClientConfig, run

run(ClientConfig(
    server_url="ws://your-server.com/ws",
    secret="shared-secret",
    service="my-api",
    forward_to="http://localhost:8080",
))

outpunch-client \
  --server-url ws://your-server.com/ws \
  --secret shared-secret \
  --service my-api \
  --forward-to http://localhost:8080

Requires: Rust, Python 3.10+ (with uv), Node.js 18+ (with npm).

just test-all     # run all test suites (Rust + Python + Node.js)
just coverage     # Rust test coverage
just lint         # rustfmt + clippy

Releasing: see docs/releasing.md.

MIT