Cloudflared as a Service

A Quick Prologue

Previously, I attempted to get Cloudflare Tunnels running on a Le Potato, so that I could SSH into it from anywhere. Once I had that working, I quickly realized one major flaw in my plan: if Le Potato restarted for any reason, my tunnel would go down and I would be locked out!

Thankfully, the wonderful people at Cloudflare were already one step ahead of me. To fix just this scenario, they have commands built-in to “cloudflared”, that will allow you to run your tunnels as a service. This means that any time the machine boots up, it will be available via the tunnel.

This setup is pretty quick, so let’s get started.

Cloudflare Tunnels as a Service

Note: This tutorial assumes you already have a cloudflare tunnel configured.

First, install the cloudflare service:

cloudflared service install

Next, start the service:

systemctl start cloudflared

Now, to be sure that everything is setup correctly, you’ll want to run the following command:

systemctl status cloudflared

If you don’t get an error message (and instead see something like “Status: active”), then you should be good to go. If you’re brave, you might even run a reboot and see what happens!

reboot

In my case, I decided to run the reboot command from a remote instance, while I was far away from home (where Le Potato lives). It was an agonizing few seconds while I waited for the system to boot back up and connect via the tunnel, but it did eventually re-connect! On the first try!