Tunnels and port forwarding

What tunnels are for#

A tunnel carries network traffic through an SSH connection. You can reach a database that only listens on the server, open a service on your computer to the server, or route an application through the server with a SOCKS5 proxy. Ravelon saves tunnels as rules in your vault, so you set them up once.

Create a tunnel#

Open Tunnels in the sidebar and click New tunnel. Enter a name, choose the host under Through host and pick the Type:

Then enter the ports and the destination. The Bind address decides where the tunnel listens. 127.0.0.1 keeps it off the network, so only programs on your own computer can use it.

Start and stop#

Click Start next to a rule. If the host is not connected yet, Ravelon connects first. Stop ends the tunnel. A tunnel uses the same connection as your terminals and the file browser to that host, so it needs no extra sign-in.

With Start automatically once the host connects, the tunnel starts as soon as you open a session to that host. If the port is busy, Ravelon reports it once instead of retrying in a loop.

Example#

To reach PostgreSQL on a server that only listens locally, create a Local tunnel through that server with local port 5432, remote host 127.0.0.1 and remote port 5432. After starting it, connect your database tool to 127.0.0.1:5432 on your computer.