Quick Start
Get your first tunnel running in under 5 minutes
This guide walks you through creating and starting your first Cloudflare Tunnel with FlareDeck. By the end, you'll have a local service exposed to the internet.
Make sure you've completed the Installation steps before continuing. You need cloudflared installed and authenticated.
Create Your First Tunnel
Launch FlareDeck
Open FlareDeck from the Start Menu. On first launch, it will detect your cloudflared installation and scan for existing tunnels.
Create a Profile
Click New Profile in the sidebar. Give your profile a descriptive name — for example, my-dev-server.
FlareDeck creates a new named tunnel via cloudflared and generates a configuration file at ~/.cloudflared/<profile-id>.yml.
Add an Ingress Rule
In the profile editor, click Add Rule to create your first ingress entry:
- Hostname:
myapp.example.com(a subdomain on your Cloudflare zone) - Service:
http://localhost:3000(your local dev server)
ingress:
- hostname: myapp.example.com
service: http://localhost:3000
- service: http_status:404The catch-all rule (http_status:404) is added automatically.
Configure DNS
Click Add DNS Route to point your hostname to the tunnel. FlareDeck runs the equivalent of:
cloudflared tunnel route dns <tunnel-id> myapp.example.comThis creates a CNAME record in your Cloudflare DNS.
Start the Tunnel
Click the Start button. FlareDeck spawns cloudflared tunnel run as a background process and begins streaming logs in the Monitor tab.
You should see output similar to:
INF Starting tunnel tunnelID=<your-tunnel-id>
INF Connection established connIndex=0
INF Connection established connIndex=1Verify
Open https://myapp.example.com in your browser. You should see your local development server's response served through the Cloudflare Tunnel.
The Monitor tab shows live connection logs and any errors. The profile status indicator turns green when the tunnel is healthy.