Set Up an Internet Gateway Network for Your Home Using a Raspberry Pi and HTTPS Tunnel
Now Alex Elllis can get access to any private services he wants from a public IP provided by the cloud.
Alex Ellis has designed a cheap ($10) Internet gateway network for home networks using a Raspberry Pi and an HTTPS (HTTP/SSL) tunnel. Think of it as being similar to an internet gateway using port forwarding on a router, only with a host of downsides, including blocked ports, location disclosure, and changing DHCP IPs. Because of those issues, Ellis paired the Pi with inlets, which is a reverse proxy and network tunnel that will work with the Pi, acting as a gateway/router, but will only expose services users want public.
To build his internet gateway, Ellis used the Raspberry Pi Zero W, 8Gb/16Gb micro SD card (loaded with Raspbian Lite), SD card writer (in his case, the Apple USB-C SD card writer), and an API access token for a public cloud, such as DigitalOcean. Once the Raspberry Pi is set up, the inlets are installed, and as mentioned earlier, combine a reverse proxy and WebSocket tunnels, which display internal and development endpoints to the Internet via exit node.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W doesn’t host any services but acts as the gateway between the home network (LAN), and an exit-server hosted on the cloud. The inlets allow users to manage what services to proxy in that gateway. Alex has written an extensive walkthrough on how to build and deploy his internet gateway, complete with links to all the necessary code, for those who would like to recreate his endeavor on his blog linked above.