Show HN: Mcptunnels – ngrok for MCP with basic OAuth

Mcptunnels v1, an open-source tool from developer terragohan, exposes any stdio MCP server as a public Streamable HTTP URL with a single command, featuring built-in OAuth 2.1, no account requirement, and ephemeral 24-hour tunnels. The tool bridges MCP servers to HTTP for clients like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor, and supports self-hosted relays, with the hosted relay at tunnel.mcptunnels.xyz as the default.

One command mcptunnel expose -- <your MCP server spawns any stdio MCP server, bridges it to Streamable HTTP, and prints a public URL. Nothing to deploy. mcptunnel expose -- <your MCP server spawns any stdio MCP server, bridges it to Streamable HTTP, and prints a public URL. Nothing to deploy. No signup, no login, no config files. The hosted relay at tunnel.mcptunnels.xyz is the default — or self-host your own tunneld . Public endpoints are gated behind a password the CLI generates. Clients like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor discover the OAuth flow automatically. --no-auth for open URLs. Tunnels live for 24 hours, then they’re gone. Ctrl-C deletes the tunnel server-side immediately — the URL and password die with your process. Generic tunnels forward raw TCP/HTTP. mcptunnels is MCP-shaped. | mcptunnels | ngrok | cloudflared | bore | | |---|---|---|---|---| | Takes an MCP server command | ✅ | ❌ ports only | ❌ | ❌ | | stdio → Streamable HTTP bridging | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | No account required | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ named tunnels | ✅ | | Self-hostable relay | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | | Ephemeral-by-default URLs | ✅ 24h TTL | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | If you already have an MCP server listening on a port with its own HTTP transport, a generic tunnel works fine. mcptunnels removes the stdio bridging step and everything around it. Status: v1. The tunnel data plane is covered by end-to-end tests; compatibility with every major hosted MCP client is not yet exhaustively verified. Bug reports welcome on GitHub https://github.com/terragohan/mcptunnels/issues . Where mcptunnels is headed. Roughly ordered; no dates — this is a spare-time project and priorities follow real user pain. mcptunnel expose – <cmd → public URL. –no-auth for open URLs . tunneld : single binary + SQLite, ACME TLS, Docker or bare-metal.The MVP’s ephemerality is the feature that lets us skip accounts — and the first thing real users will outgrow. /<you /<name once, keep it across restarts, reboots, and laptop sleeps.Today expose bolts a public URL onto a single local process. The destination is making MCP servers easy to run and scale as Streamable HTTP services. Per-tunnel OAuth 2.1 discovery metadata, DCR, PKCE shipped with the MVP. What comes later: https://tunnel.mcptunnels.xyz for convenience — it’s free and best-effort, and self-hosting stays a first-class path. File an issue https://github.com/terragohan/mcptunnels/issues describing your use case — especially if the MVP’s 24h model is the thing blocking you. That’s the signal that permanent tunnels should move up.