hostc

Overview of hostc

What it is

Localhost, anywhere. One command gives your dev server a public HTTPS URL, with WebSockets and hot reload. Free, no account, runs on Cloudflare Workers.

Key features

• Nothing to set up. No sign-up, no auth token, no binary to download. If you have Node.js, you have hostc.
• Visitors see your app. No warning page to click through before they reach it.
• Hot reload works. WebSockets pass straight through, so Vite, Next.js and friends update every open device the moment you save. Server-Sent Events stream as they are produced.
• Dev servers accept it as is. Requests arrive addressed to localhost and redirects point back to the public URL, so there is no allowed-hosts setting to change.
• The link survives. Network drops and server restarts don't change the URL; hostc reconnects on its own.
• Free and open source. The server is a Cloudflare Worker you can also run on your own domain.

Use cases

• share something you built with an AI coding tool before you deploy it anywhere, - show work in progress to a teammate or a client, - test webhooks from Stripe, GitHub or Slack against the code on your machine, - try your site on a real phone, with hot reload, - let a coding agent share what it built. Point the agent at hostc.dev/llms.txt and it knows how to run hostc and read the URL.

Getting started

Start your app, then point hostc at its port: sh npx hostc@latest 3000

License and pricing

License: Apache-2.0. Free and open source.

Based on the project's public README and repository metadata.