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Ingress Tunnels

Sometimes it can be beneficial to allow other team members access to your locally running Bitwarden instance. Usually this involves opening ports in firewalls, and even then you can usually only connect through the IP address.

Configure Web​

If the goal is to expose the local web vault (which includes access to most services) then the web vault needs to be configured to not use https and instead serve it’s content unencrypted.

Open webpack.config.js and comment out the following lines from const devServer = {

https: {
  key: fs.readFileSync('dev-server' + certSuffix + '.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('dev-server' + certSuffix + '.pem'),
},

And add the domain to allowedHosts in local.json:

{
  "allowedHosts": ["<super-secret-tunnel>"]
}

Cloudflare Argo Tunnels​

An alternative method which provides a few benefits are to use Cloudflare Argo Tunnels. Which works by setting up a local tunnel between Cloudflare and your local machine, which provides access to a locally running service. The tunnel can additionally be placed behind a cloudflare proxy which provides a valid SSL certificate, making it perfect for testing with the mobile applications.

Setup​

  1. Download and install cloudflared
  2. Start you local web server and take note of the $PORT it is running on
  3. Start the tunnel using cloudflared tunnel --url http://127.0.0.1:$PORT

Cloudflare will build you a tunnel and provide the url to it: *.trycloudflare.com. Wait for the DNS to start resolving before trying to access it.

Note, anyone with this URL can access the forwarded URL on your machine.

Ngrok​

  1. Sign up for a free ngrok account

  2. Follow the official instructions to download. Or install using brew which supports multiple instances per account.

  3. Expose your local port using ngrok:

    ngrok http <port>

  4. ngrok's interface should display a "Forwarding" url, for example:

    https://abcd-123-456-789.au.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:<port>

  5. Verify that the forwarding url works by navigating to the forwarding url with /alive on the end. For example, https://abcd-123-456-789.au.ngrok.io/alive.

note

Anyone with this URL can access the forwarded URL on your machine.