Tunnels

Hatch can expose your local services to the internet using Cloudflare Tunnels. This is useful for sharing work with teammates, testing webhooks, and mobile device testing.

Quick tunnels

Quick tunnels require no Cloudflare account. They give you a temporary public URL on trycloudflare.com:

services:
  web:
    proxy: http://localhost:3000
    tunnel: true

Or start one on demand:

hatch tunnel start myapp/web
# URL: https://random-words.trycloudflare.com

Quick tunnel URLs are temporary. They change each time the tunnel restarts.

Named tunnels

Named tunnels give you a persistent domain through your Cloudflare account. Create a tunnel in the Cloudflare dashboard, then reference it by name:

# ~/.hatch/config.yml
settings:
  cloudflare_token: "your-api-token"

# hatch.yml
services:
  web:
    proxy: http://localhost:3000
    tunnel: my-tunnel-name

When a named tunnel starts, Hatch uses the API token to resolve the tunnel JWT automatically. Without an API token, cloudflared falls back to credential files in ~/.cloudflared/.

When to use each

	Quick	Named
Setup	None	Cloudflare account + tunnel config
URL	Random, changes each time	Persistent custom domain
Use case	Temporary sharing, quick demos	Webhooks, stable preview URLs
Account	Not required	Required

Vite and HMR

Vite’s hot module replacement works through quick tunnels without any Vite configuration. Hatch runs a local rewrite proxy that handles localhost URL rewriting and WebSocket forwarding automatically.

For the full guide on tunnel setup, CLI commands, and advanced configuration, see Share a Dev Server.

For implementation details, see Architecture.