Forem: Diyarbek

I built Tunn - a tunneling tool in Rust (ngrok alternative)

Diyarbek — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:05:43 +0000

Hey r/rust! I've been working on Tunn, a tunneling tool that exposes your localhost to the internet. Think ngrok, but built in Rust on top of QUIC.

Why I built it:
I was using ngrok for webhook testing and got frustrated with the latency and session time limits. TCP-based tunneling felt like it could be better, so I decided to try QUIC (using quinn).

Results:
Benchmarked against ngrok with 500 requests (keep-alive, 10 concurrent):

Tunn: 135ms avg, 65.9 req/s
ngrok: 663ms avg, 15.0 req/s

QUIC multiplexing makes a big difference — one connection handles all requests, no per-request TLS handshakes.

Features:

HTTP, TCP, and UDP tunneling
Built-in web request inspector (localhost:4040)
QR code in terminal for quick mobile access
0-RTT reconnect on network changes
Single binary, no dependencies

Tech stack:

quinn for QUIC transport
axum for the inspector web server
clap for CLI
tokio for async runtime
rustls (no native-tls, for easy cross-compilation)

GitHub: https://github.com/Diyarbekoralbaev/tunn

Install:

curl -s https://tunn.uz/install | bash
tunn http 3000

Would love feedback on the architecture and any rough edges you find. The QUIC implementation was the most interesting part to build — happy to discuss the details.

I built Tunn - a QUIC-based tunneling tool in Rust (ngrok alternative)

Diyarbek — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:03:32 +0000