Cloudflared is the command-line client for Cloudflare Tunnel, a tunneling daemon that proxies traffic from the Cloudflare network to origin servers without requiring firewall modifications. Written in Go, the project enables secure connectivity by sitting between the Cloudflare network and user origins, allowing origins to remain fully closed while still receiving client requests routed through Cloudflare's infrastructure. The daemon handles both HTTP and WebSocket traffic through the tunnel command interface, as well as Layer 4 TCP traffic for protocols like SSH and RDP via the access command interface.
The repository serves multiple use cases within Cloudflare's zero-trust networking ecosystem. Beyond basic tunneling, cloudflared supports private routing scenarios that do not require a website to be added to Cloudflare, though legacy requirements still mandate this step for most deployments. Users can route traffic to tunnels through public DNS records in Cloudflare, via Cloudflare Load Balancers for public hostnames, or from WARP client private traffic. The project also includes TryCloudflare, a testing feature that allows users to evaluate Cloudflare Tunnel functionality before committing to a full setup.
Installation flexibility is a core strength of the project. Cloudflared is distributed as standalone binaries, Docker images, and native packages for macOS via Homebrew, Linux via Debian and RPM packages, and Windows through dedicated installers. Users can also build from source using the provided Makefile. The project maintains a one-year support window for versions, with breaking changes potentially introduced for releases older than one year from the most recent version.
Development of cloudflared relies on GNU Make, capnp for schema compilation, and Go version 1.26 or later. The build system supports testing via make test, code formatting with make fmt, linting through make lint, and mock generation with make mocks. Optional development tools include capnpc-go, goimports, golangci-lint, and gomocks. The repository includes pre-push git hooks configured in .githooks/ that automatically run formatting checks, linting, and tests before each push to prevent CI failures.
Activity tracking shows the repository maintains active issue and pull request management across 462 tracked items with a median response latency of 0.0 hours, though the mean latency of 5556.2 hours reflects occasional longer-term discussions. The most common issue classifications are Priority: Normal with 357 occurrences, Type: Bug with 239 occurrences, and Type: Feature Request with 114 occurrences. Primary contributors tracked by GitGenius include jcsf with 130 events, nikitacano with 37 events, and realyukii with 13 events. The project shares contributors with microsoft/vscode, microsoft/typescript, and rust-lang/rust, indicating cross-ecosystem involvement in the broader developer tooling community.
