Sidecar Proxy Tunnels in DevContainers: The Modern Standard for Secure Local Development
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Stop installing tunneling tools on your host machine. The practice of running ngrok , cloudflared , or any other tunneling daemon as a rogue process on your laptop is an anti-pattern that belongs in the past. In 2026, the correct approach is to codify your entire network topology — including public tunnel access — inside your devcontainer.json . This guide covers how to do it right, which tools to choose, and why this architectural shift matters. Why the Old Way Breaks Down The classic developer workflow looks like this: clone a repo, install dependencies, install ngrok globally, spin up a tunnel, paste the URL somewhere, and repeat every time the session expires. It works — until it doesn’t. The problems compound as teams grow: Non-reproducibility. The tunnel tool version on your machine differs from your colleague’s. Behaviour diverges. Bugs get blamed on the wrong layer. Security drift. A globally installed daemon with n...