Everything you wanted to know about using Cloudflare Zero Trust Argo tunnels for your personal network. For those like me who were still confused even after reading the article, I think this is the lowdown:
- ZT tunnels let you expose private resources/services to the internet (or your users) via Cloudflare’s edge network. You install cloudflared on an internal host, and register a “tunnel” so that requests to a hostname or IP get forwarded securely into your network (similar to tailscale).
- Unlike classic VPNs (which open full network access) or traditional Cloudflare tunnels (which merely publish a service), this approach adds granular access control; you can define exactly who can access which resource, based on identity, device posture, login method, etc.
- It also solves NAT/firewall issues often faced by P2P-based overlays (e.g., Tailscale) by routing everything through Cloudflare’s network, avoiding connectivity failures when peer-to-peer fails.
For in-browser auth you can then use Cloudflare Access, or you can install the cloudflare Warp client which is a VPN-like thing that would give you full control over the access to whatever service(s) you were exposing this way.
Pangolin is a reverse proxy, so it can forward a URL to any backend service on any port. But you’re right in that you have to be signed in on the browser you access it on. Therefore an app won’t directly work without prior login. You can create a ‘shareable link’ in Pangolin, which I use for the Immich app. This gives me header tokens that the Immich app can take in its advanced settings, and that’s how that one works.
I’ve recently moved away from dedicated apps for mobile services and toward web-based access for most things (I use Music Assistant in browser). This isn’t perfect for everything and everyone, but I realise now with your question that it’s worked well for me transitioning to Pangolin (and at least Immich app works).