Sharing a Project Publicly

Rezure can expose a running local project to the internet for a short time: a demo for a client, a quick check on your phone, or a link for a teammate who isn't on your network. One click on the Projects page starts a Cloudflare Quick Tunnel and gives you an https://…trycloudflare.com link you can copy and send.

No Cloudflare account, no tunnel config file, and no port forwarding on your router.

Before you share

Make sure the basics are already working locally:

1. Nginx is running on the Services page. The tunnel forwards traffic into your local stack; if Nginx isn't up, the public link has nothing to reach.
2. The project opens locally: click Open on the project row and confirm myapp.test (or whatever domain Rezure assigned) loads in your browser.
3. You have internet access. Rezure talks to Cloudflare's edge to open the tunnel.

That's it. PHP projects need their PHP service running, and the database only matters if the page you're sharing needs one, same as for local browsing.

JavaScript and Node projects share the same way: the tunnel goes through Nginx to the project's dev server, so start it first (click Open) and keep it running while the link is out.

How to share

1. Open the Projects page.
2. Find the project and click its Share icon ("Share this project publicly (Cloudflare Quick Tunnel)").
3. Sharing starts straight away and a modal shows the progress: "Setting up your project…", "Starting the tunnel…", "Almost done…". The first time you share on a machine, Rezure also downloads the cloudflared binary; that can take a few seconds.
4. When the tunnel is ready, the modal shows a public URL like https://random-words-here.trycloudflare.com. Click Copy and send it to whoever needs access.
5. Click Stop sharing when you're done, or Close the modal and stop later from the same icon.

While a share is active, the Share icon is filled in the accent colour. Click it again anytime to reopen the modal and copy the link. You can share several projects at once; each gets its own link.

What recipients see

Anyone with the link can open your project in a normal browser while sharing stays on. They do not need Rezure, your Wi‑Fi, or a .test domain on their machine; the tunnel URL is the whole address.

New links can take up to a minute before they respond from another device or network. If the first load fails, wait a bit and try again.

First-time setup

The first share on a fresh install triggers a one-time download of Cloudflare's cloudflared tool. Rezure verifies the file with a SHA-256 checksum before using it.

The binary is stored at:

C:\rezure\bin\cloudflared\<version>\cloudflared.exe

After that, starting a share is usually just a few seconds, mostly waiting for Cloudflare to hand back the public URL.

How it works (briefly)

Behind the button, Rezure:

1. Starts a small local proxy that forwards requests to Nginx with the correct Host header for your project's .test domain.
2. Runs cloudflared tunnel --url … against that proxy.
3. Cloudflare returns a random public https://*.trycloudflare.com URL and routes incoming HTTPS traffic back to your machine.

Frameworks often build absolute URLs from the local domain, and myapp.test means nothing on someone else's computer. So on the way back, the proxy rewrites them to the tunnel URL:

• Redirects: a Location: http://myapp.test/login header sends the browser to https://<tunnel>/login instead.
• Page content: in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, plain-text, and SVG responses, every http://myapp.test, https://myapp.test, and bare myapp.test becomes the tunnel's https:// address. That's what keeps Laravel's Vite asset links and similar absolute URLs working for visitors.

Images, fonts, and other binary files pass through untouched.

When you stop sharing or quit Rezure, the tunnel process is torn down. Nothing keeps proxying after that.

Limitations

Sharing is meant for temporary, local development use, not for hosting a production site.

• The URL changes each time you start a new share. Quick Tunnels don't give you a fixed hostname.
• Sharing stops when you click Stop sharing or when Rezure exits.
• Responses are delivered whole. The proxy reads each response completely before sending it on, so streamed responses (server-sent events, long downloads that report progress) arrive all at once, and WebSocket connections don't get through.
• Cookies scoped to the .test domain aren't rewritten. A login that sets a cookie for myapp.test explicitly may not stick for visitors; a cookie with no domain set works.
• Traffic goes through Cloudflare's free Quick Tunnel service, subject to Cloudflare's own limits and availability.
• This is not hardened production hosting. Don't expose sensitive data, admin panels without authentication, or anything you wouldn't trust on a dev machine reachable from the internet.
• Rezure does not open any database port publicly; only the web project you shared.

For a permanent public deployment, use a proper host and deploy pipeline instead.

Troubleshooting

The modal stays on "Starting the tunnel…" for a long time

On the very first share, Rezure is probably still downloading cloudflared. Give it up to half a minute on a slow connection.

If it never finishes, check that nothing is blocking outbound HTTPS (firewall, corporate proxy, offline Wi‑Fi). Rezure gives up after 20 seconds without a URL and shows the end of cloudflared's log.

An error mentions cloudflared exited immediately

Usually no route to the internet, or Cloudflare's edge was unreachable from your network. Fix connectivity and try again.

Visitors see "share proxy error … couldn't reach nginx"

Nginx stopped after the share started. Start it again on the Services page; the link keeps working once it's back.

A share started but the link doesn't load from my phone

Wait up to a minute: Quick Tunnel URLs sometimes need a short moment to propagate. Confirm Nginx is still running and the project still loads locally via Open.

I closed the modal but sharing is still on

That's expected. Closing the modal only hides it. The tunnel keeps running until you click Stop sharing or quit Rezure. The filled Share icon means a tunnel is still active; click it to reopen the link or stop.

I reloaded the Projects page and the icon is still filled

Rezure restores active share state after a reload, so you won't lose a running tunnel just because the UI refreshed.

Related

• First Run: start services and serve a project locally first
• Projects: everything else the project actions do
• FAQ: ports, permissions, and what Rezure installs