Expose a local port through any NAT in 60 seconds

Running a service locally — a Jupyter notebook, a Minecraft server, a private Grafana dashboard — and wanting to reach it from outside your home network used to mean one of three things: configure port forwarding on your router, rent a VPS and set up a reverse proxy, or pay for a managed tunnel service and accept their data path.

Linkvec adds a fourth option: use a broker (ours or your own) to punch through NAT, and connect by service name instead of IP address.

Install in one line

curl -fsSL https://downloads.linkvec.com/linkvec-install.sh | sh

This drops a single linkvec binary into ~/.local/bin. No root required. No package manager. No daemon installed system-wide.

Expose a port

linkvec expose --port 8080 --name myservice

This creates a serverlet — a named tunnel endpoint that listens on port 8080 on your machine and registers with your broker. The broker doesn’t see your traffic; it only brokers the connection handshake.

Connect from anywhere

On any other machine:

linkvec connect --service linkvec://myservice

Linkvec resolves myservice through the broker, negotiates a direct path if both peers support QUIC, and falls back to a relayed path if they don’t. Either way, the connection appears as a local port on the connecting machine.

What the broker actually does

The broker is the trust boundary — it authenticates peers and resolves service names. It does not forward your data by default. Once both peers are authenticated, Linkvec attempts a direct QUIC connection (similar to QUIC hole-punching). The relay only carries traffic if the direct path fails.

This means:

• Low latency: direct peer-to-peer when possible
• No data lock-in: your traffic doesn’t pass through Linkvec’s infrastructure
• Bring your own broker: run linkvec broker on any VPS and point your clients at it

Grouping services with hubs

linkvec hub create homelab
linkvec expose --port 8080 --name grafana --hub homelab
linkvec expose --port 9090 --name prometheus --hub homelab

A hub is a logical group and lifecycle container. Share the hub with a teammate and they can reach all services inside it by name.

What’s next

• Pricing — community tier is free, no credit card required
• Why Linkvec — how Linkvec compares to ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel, and raw WireGuard
• Docs — full CLI reference