If the idea of opening ports on your home or office router makes you nervous, you are right to be nervous. Every open port is an invitation to every scanner on the internet, and maintaining a VPN server just to reach one web app is a lot of moving parts. Cloudflare Tunnel exists to solve exactly that problem: your machine reaches out to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare reaches back, with no inbound ports anywhere.
Cloudflare is a company that provides internet security and performance services. One of their services is called Cloudflare Access, which is a Zero Trust security solution that enables secure remote access to applications and resources. Cloudflare Access uses a feature called Cloudflare Tunnel to provide secure and encrypted access to web applications, and the client that runs on your machine is called cloudflared.
In this tutorial, we will walk through the steps to install Cloudflare Tunnel on a Fedora 36 machine. We will assume that the tunnels have already been created in the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard, so all that is left is connecting your machine to them.
Step 1: 📦 Add Cloudflared Repo to DNF Config Manager
The first step is to add the Cloudflared repo to the DNF config manager. To do this, run the following command in the terminal:
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflared-ascii.repoThis will add the Cloudflared repo to the DNF config manager. Cloudflare maintains their own repository precisely so Fedora users get the package directly from the source, instead of waiting for third party mirrors.
Step 2: ⬇️ Install Cloudflared
The next step is to install Cloudflared. To do this, run the following command in the terminal:
sudo dnf install cloudflaredThis will install Cloudflared on your Fedora 36 machine. You can verify the installation with cloudflared --version to confirm that the binary is on your PATH and ready to go.
Step 3: 🔌 Install the Systemd Service
The final step is to install the Systemd service. To do this, run the following command in the terminal:
sudo cloudflared service install <token>Replace <token> with your Cloudflare Access token. You can find your Access token in the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard. This command will install the Cloudflared Systemd service and configure it to use your Access token, which means the tunnel starts automatically on boot and stays up without you touching it.
🧠 Final Thoughts
In this tutorial, we have walked through the steps to install Cloudflared on a Fedora 36 machine. With Cloudflared installed, you can now use Cloudflare Tunnel to securely access your web applications without exposing a single port to the public internet. Your service lives behind Cloudflare’s edge, authenticated at the gateway, which is the whole promise of Zero Trust.
If you have any questions or run into any issues, refer to the Cloudflare documentation or reach out to their support team for assistance. The setup is three commands, but it replaces what used to be a weekend project of firewall rules and reverse proxies. Thanks for reading!