A modern, simple TCP tunnel in Rust that exposes local ports to a remote server, bypassing standard NAT connection firewalls. That's all it does: no more, and no less.

# Installation (requires Rust, see alternatives below)
cargo install bore-cli

# On your local machine
bore local 8000 --to bore.pub

This will expose your local port at localhost:8000 to the public internet at bore.pub:<PORT>, where the port number is assigned randomly.

Similar to localtunnel and ngrok, except bore is intended to be a highly efficient, unopinionated tool for forwarding TCP traffic that is simple to install and easy to self-host, with no frills attached.

(bore totals about 400 lines of safe, async Rust code and is trivial to set up — just run a single binary for the client and server.)

If you're on macOS, bore is packaged as a Homebrew core formula.

brew install bore-cli

Otherwise, the easiest way to install bore is from prebuilt binaries. These are available on the releases page for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Just unzip the appropriate file for your platform and move the bore executable into a folder on your PATH.

You also can build bore from source using Cargo, the Rust package manager. This command installs the bore binary at a user-accessible path.

cargo install bore-cli

We also publish versioned Docker images for each release. The image is built for an AMD 64-bit architecture. They're tagged with the specific version and allow you to run the statically-linked bore binary from a minimal "scratch" container.

docker run -it --init --rm --network host ekzhang/bore <ARGS>

This section describes detailed usage for the bore CLI command.

You can forward a port on your local machine by using the bore local command. This takes a positional argument, the local port to forward, as well as a mandatory --to option, which specifies the address of the remote server.

bore local 5000 --to bore.pub

You can optionally pass in a --port option to pick a specific port on the remote to expose, although the command will fail if this port is not available. Also, passing --local-host allows you to expose a different host on your local area network besides the loopback address localhost.

The full options are shown below.

Starts a local proxy to the remote server

Usage: bore local [OPTIONS] --to <TO> <LOCAL_PORT>

Arguments:
  <LOCAL_PORT>  The local port to expose

Options:
  -l, --local-host <HOST>  The local host to expose [default: localhost]
  -t, --to <TO>            Address of the remote server to expose local ports to [env: BORE_SERVER=]
  -p, --port <PORT>        Optional port on the remote server to select [default: 0]
  -s, --secret <SECRET>    Optional secret for authentication [env: BORE_SECRET]
  -h,