DockFlare: Docker labels, Cloudflare Tunnels, and a little less dashboard clicking
Hello everyone, I wanted to share a project I started in 2025 to solve something that kept getting on my nerves in my own homelab. Every time I deployed another container, I found myself back in the Cloudflare dashboard. Add a hostname, point it at the service, configure Access, and remember to clean things up when I stopped using it. Nothing particularly difficult. Just the same work, again and…
In 2025, Chris developed DockFlare to address the repetitive task of managing Cloudflare Tunnel routes, DNS records, and Access policies for each Docker container he deployed. DockFlare simplifies this process by utilizing container labels to configure these settings automatically. To expose a web container, you only need to add three labels: dockflare.enable=true, dockflare.hostname=your_hostname, and dockflare.service=http://container:port.
DockFlare then takes care of the rest, eliminating the need for published container ports and opening inbound ports on your router.
Once DockFlare is set up, you can define access policies using Cloudflare Zero Trust. For example, to allow access only to specific authenticated users, create an Access Group called admin-users and add the required email addresses. Then, add the dockflare.access.group=admin-users label to the relevant service. This allows you to restrict access to your services without modifying the Access policies directly.
DockFlare handles updates, Docker restarts, and API unavailability by implementing a configurable grace period and checking running containers upon startup. The project is open source under GPL-3.0, and the code and release notes are available on GitHub. Chris invites users to try DockFlare, share their experiences, and contribute to its ongoing development.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
