Port Forwarding

Port Forwarding

Port forwarding lets developers securely access processes on their Coder workspace from a local machine. A common use case is testing web applications in a browser.

There are three ways to forward ports in Coder:

The coder port-forward command
Dashboard
SSH

The coder port-forward command is generally more performant than:

The Dashboard which proxies traffic through the Coder control plane versus peer-to-peer which is possible with the Coder CLI
sshd which does double encryption of traffic with both Wireguard and SSH

The `coder port-forward` command

This command can be used to forward TCP or UDP ports from the remote workspace so they can be accessed locally. Both the TCP and UDP command line flags (--tcp and --udp) can be given once or multiple times.

The supported syntax variations for the --tcp and --udp flag are:

Single port with optional remote port: local_port[:remote_port]
Comma separation local_port1,local_port2
Port ranges start_port-end_port
Any combination of the above

Examples

Forward the remote TCP port 8080 to local port 8000:

coder port-forward myworkspace --tcp 8000:8080

Forward the remote TCP port 3000 and all ports from 9990 to 9999 to their respective local ports.

coder port-forward myworkspace --tcp 3000,9990-9999

For more examples, see coder port-forward --help.

Dashboard

To enable port forwarding via the dashboard, Coder must be configured with a wildcard access URL. If an access URL is not specified, Coder will create a publicly accessible URL to reverse proxy the deployment, and port forwarding will work.

There is a DNS limitation where each segment of hostnames must not exceed 63 characters. If your app name, agent name, workspace name and username exceed 63 characters in the hostname, port forwarding via the dashboard will not work.

From an coder_app resource

One way to port forward is to configure a coder_app resource in the workspace's template. This approach shows a visual application icon in the dashboard. See the following coder_app example for a Node React app and note the subdomain and share settings:

# node app
resource "coder_app" "node-react-app" {
  agent_id  = coder_agent.dev.id
  slug      = "node-react-app"
  icon      = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/React-icon.svg"
  url       = "http://localhost:3000"
  subdomain = true
  share     = "authenticated"

  healthcheck {
    url       = "http://localhost:3000/healthz"
    interval  = 10
    threshold = 30
  }

}

Valid share values include owner - private to the user, authenticated - accessible by any user authenticated to the Coder deployment, and public - accessible by users outside of the Coder deployment.

Accessing workspace ports

Another way to port forward in the dashboard is to use the "Open Ports" button to specify an arbitrary port. Coder will also detect if apps inside the workspace are listening on ports, and list them below the port input (this is only supported on Windows and Linux workspace agents).

You can share ports as URLs, either with other authenticated coder users or publicly. Using the open ports interface, you can assign a sharing levels that match our coder_app’s share option in Coder terraform provider.

owner (Default): The implicit sharing level for all listening ports, only visible to the workspace owner
authenticated: Accessible by other authenticated Coder users on the same deployment.
public: Accessible by any user with the associated URL.

Once a port is shared at either authenticated or public levels, it will stay pinned in the open ports UI for better visibility regardless of whether or not it is still accessible.

The sharing level is limited by the maximum level enforced in the template settings in licensed deployments, and not restricted in OSS deployments.

This can also be used to change the sharing level of port-based coder_apps by entering their port number in the sharable ports UI. The share attribute on coder_app resource uses a different method of authentication and is not impacted by the template's maximum sharing level, nor the level of a shared port that points to the app.

Configuring port protocol

Both listening and shared ports can be configured to use either HTTP or HTTPS to connect to the port. For listening ports the protocol selector applies to any port you input or select from the menu. Shared ports have protocol configuration for each shared port individually.

You can also access any port on the workspace and can configure the port protocol manually by appending a s to the port in the URL.

# Uses HTTP
https://33295--agent--workspace--user--apps.example.com/
# Uses HTTPS
https://33295s--agent--workspace--user--apps.example.com/

SSH

First, configure SSH on your local machine. Then, use ssh to forward like so:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8000 coder.myworkspace

You can read more on SSH port forwarding here.

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Port forwarding

The coder port-forward command