Oh great. So now there's a tuwunel and a towonel and they're completely different things.
(tuwunel is a fork of the matrix backend conduwuit. not to be confused with continuwuity, another conduwuit fork)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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I know, the naming isn't ideal.
On the bright side, you can now expose multiple tuwunel instances via a single towonel and federate with other tuwunels on other towonels for maximum uwu owo
Which is almost what my friends and I are doing, except we're running continuwuity instead of tuwunel.
Holy shit. That's all I got
Huh, I wasn't aware there were Conduit forks, thanks!
Oh right, forgot to mention conduwuit was itself a fork of conduit. Man
What other apps are in the UwU stack?
So I built towonel. In Rust, partly because I wanted to learn the language properly
This bit makes me a little wary.
Why? I didn’t know python until one of my clients decided they would only use it for everything going forward. It took me all of a day to start converting C# code and this was a decade before LLMs.
Knowledge of a specific language does not reflect development skill.
Yes, but ported C# usually doesn't make for the most idiomatic Python.
99% of the time that doesn't matter, but a highly security sensitive reverse proxy shared by multiple users most likely part of the stack to be attacked might be an exception.
I like how you just assumed that what I was doing wasn’t security oriented…
Was it?
It dealt with debit and credit card transactions…
It's interesting OP. I use the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, and I'm pretty much sold on it, much to the chagrin of others here. Yes, there are caveats, pros and cons. Even tho I am sold on the product, I would entertain a clone/fork/rewrite if it gave me everything that Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust along with the security features. I'll do some reading once the blog is back up.
Very cool. I personally use a double wireguard network: a wireguard vpn at home for all my services, and then since my home network is behind a double NAT and impossible to access publicly, I use a second wireguard tunnel to a VPS, to forward traffic to my internal wireguard network. The only thing the VPS can see is encrypted wireguard packets.
Edit: it seems like this service is more for public or shared services (like a public blog), rather than private personal services, so wireguard is less of an option
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TCP | Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #304 for this comm, first seen 21st May 2026, 13:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Half of Cloudflare's value proposition is the network that provides these services. It's well connected and will have good performance in most places around the world. The software on top is the "easy" part. I'm glad to see other options though. Nice work
Haha don't worry, Erwan is already thinking about high availability and edge nodes closer to clients!
Maybe a Cloudflare competitor like Bunny CDN could use this to build their own tunnel service?
Oh, nice find. I'm saving that
Uh. Blog is down. All I get is an 404 for the link in the Mastodon post.
Edit: Here's a link that works: https://github.com/eleboucher/towonel
or https://web.archive.org/web/20260521095433/https://erwanleboucher.dev/blog/towonel/
edit: it's back up
Isn't this similar to rathole or frp?
Very similar.
The main differences are that those projects are highly configurable and can do a lot of things, while towonel is simpler: opinionated/streamlined for use as a shared Cloudflare tunnel alternative. I also think towonel may be the only one to use QUIC for the tunnel, just like Cloudflare.
Besides that, towonel is very new and still in alpha. Rathole does not seem to be actively developed anymore, which can be a good or bad thing.
Is the agent only available as a docker image? I quite like the option to run Cloudflare tunnels as a local service (e.g. in LXCs).
I'm sorry, I'm not that familiar with LXC.
Erwan will make binaries available ASAP, would that help you?
That would help, yes. 👍
LXCs are a form of virtualization. It's a container running its own isolated Linux userland while sharing the host's kernel and hardware resources.