Tunnel a local port to a remote host (like showoff.io does)

show.py

#!/usr/bin/python
#usage python show.py <local_port>

'''
Taken from: https://gist.github.com/932137 (found in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467107 )

Let's say you have a webapp running in localhost (with `manage.py runserver` in django or `ruby script.rb` in sinatra or `rails server` or whatever) and you want others to be able to see it with a public url without deploying remotely.

ssh provides a neat facility for that: tunneling. You set up a "tunnel" from the remote host to yours and vice-versa and then you give the remote host's url and it will send all of its requests to your local daemon.

You need *root* access to the remote host to configure how it will listen (I have a lighttpd conf that tells my server that `test.mydomain.com` should proxy to the port 4567, and I tunnel localhost there) and set-up the tunnel; I'd recommend using ssh public key authentication (you can copy your key with `ssh-copy-id`).

After configuring that (with apache, ngingx, lighttpd or anything), you can run your local script (say, a django app in localhost:8000) and then run this script:

python show.py 8000

And people will be able to see it from http://test.mydomain.com

'''

import sys, subprocess

remote = {
    "host": 'ssh.domain.com', #how my ssh config knows that remote
    "alias": 'test.domain.com', #the binding address to give to others
    "port":'80', #where is the remote listening
    "through":'2888' #the ssh port (is 22 by default, I have a nonstandard config)
}

port = sys.argv[1]

remote.update({'local_port': port})

print "Trying to tunnel local port %s to %s" % (port, remote["alias"])

command = "ssh -tR 1080:127.0.0.1:%(local_port)s %(host)s \"sudo ssh -Nl \$USER -L %(alias)s:%(port)s:127.0.0.1:1080 %(host)s -p %(through)s\"" % remote

subprocess.call(command, shell=True)