rathole

rathole Plugin

A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. Expose services behind NAT to the Internet via a server with a public IP.

Commands

Server Mode

• rathole server start — Start rathole in server mode with config file

Client Mode

• rathole client start — Start rathole in client mode with config file

Utility

• rathole _ _ — Passthrough to rathole CLI

Usage Examples

• "Expose my local SSH server to the internet"
• "Set up a reverse proxy tunnel through NAT"
• "Start rathole server with config"
• "Connect to rathole server from behind NAT"

Installation

cargo install rathole

Or download pre-built binaries from GitHub Releases.

Examples

# Start rathole in server mode
rathole server start server.toml

# Start rathole in client mode
rathole client start client.toml

# Explicitly specify mode
rathole server start --server server.toml
rathole client start --client client.toml

# Check version
rathole self version

# Passthrough for custom usage
rathole _ _ --help
rathole _ _ server.toml

Server Configuration (server.toml)

[server]
bind_addr = "0.0.0.0:2333"

[server.services.my_service]
token = "your_secret_token"
bind_addr = "0.0.0.0:5202"

Client Configuration (client.toml)

[client]
remote_addr = "your-server.com:2333"

[client.services.my_service]
token = "your_secret_token"
local_addr = "127.0.0.1:22"

Key Features

• High performance — Much higher throughput than frp
• Low resource consumption — Minimal memory usage, binary as small as ~500KiB
• Security — Mandatory tokens, optional Noise Protocol encryption, TLS support
• Hot reload — Add/remove services without restart
• TCP/UDP — Supports both TCP and UDP forwarding
• Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, Windows, embedded devices

Notes

• Requires a server with a public IP
• Configuration is split into server-side and client-side TOML files
• Service names must match between server and client configurations
• Supports Noise Protocol for easy encryption without certificates
• Docker image available at rapiz1/rathole