What is Rathole used for?

Rathole is a reverse proxy for NAT traversal written in Rust that exposes services behind a firewall through a public server, as an alternative to frp and ngrok. It is a good fit for exposing a home NAS service to the internet and replacing frp or ngrok tunnels.

Is Rathole open source?

Yes. Rathole is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at rathole-org/rathole and is written mainly in Rust.

Yes. Rathole is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What is Rathole an alternative to?

Rathole is an open-source alternative to ngrok and Cloudflare Tunnel. Other open-source alternatives to ngrok include frp, Zrok and Pangolin.

Is Rathole actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Rathole was on 23 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.5.0, published on 1 October 2023. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.

Rathole: open-source alternative to ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel

About Rathole

Rathole is a reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. Like frp and ngrok, it exposes a service on a device behind a NAT to the internet through a server that has a public IP, for example to reach a home NAS over SSH from outside the network.

The README highlights several design points. It claims higher throughput than frp and more stability under many connections, with benchmarks provided, and low memory use that allows a small binary suitable for embedded devices such as routers. Each service requires a token, and server and client each hold their own configuration. Encryption can be set up with the optional Noise Protocol without self-signed certificates, and TLS is also supported. Services can be added or removed by hot-reloading the configuration file.

Rathole is licensed under Apache-2.0. Usage is similar to frp, with the difference that a service is configured separately on the client and server sides. Binaries are published on the release page, you can build from source, and a Docker image is available.

Key features

Reverse proxy for NAT traversal
Mandatory per-service tokens
Optional Noise Protocol encryption
TLS support
Hot reload of configuration
Small binary for embedded devices

Good fit for

→Exposing a home NAS service to the internet
→Replacing frp or ngrok tunnels

Built with: Rust
Tags: reverse-proxy; nat-traversal; tunnel; rust; noise-protocol; networking; self-hosted; ngrok-alternative

Rathole: questions and answers

What is Rathole used for?: Rathole is a reverse proxy for NAT traversal written in Rust that exposes services behind a firewall through a public server, as an alternative to frp and ngrok. It is a good fit for exposing a home NAS service to the internet and replacing frp or ngrok tunnels.
Is Rathole open source?: Yes. Rathole is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at rathole-org/rathole and is written mainly in Rust.
Is Rathole free?: Yes. Rathole is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What is Rathole an alternative to?: Rathole is an open-source alternative to ngrok and Cloudflare Tunnel. Other open-source alternatives to ngrok include frp, Zrok and Pangolin.
Is Rathole actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Rathole was on 23 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.5.0, published on 1 October 2023. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.