How to make tunnel persistent at boot?

[msanaullahsahar]

Hi, I am using loophole to access my test website hosted on my raspberry pi. I am using these two commands to expose my website.
cd home/pi/loophole
./loophole http 80 --hostname mytestwebsite
This works fine and i am able to access my website at the generated url until my raspberry pi does not get restart. So how can i make this persistent to eliminate the need of running this code again and again at every boot?

[0x7f]

Hi @msanaullahsahar glad you are happily using loophole :)

The loophole cli itself is not a service. As you mention, it is just a binary for starting tunnels ad hoc. So when you want some binary to be executed with every boot of your raspi, you need to set up a system service. I guess you use something like raspbian on you pi which is using systemd for managing the services. There are couple of resources in the internet on how to write systemd service units (e.g. here, here, here and here).

In your case the file could look roughly like this (did not test the file):

[Unit]
Description=Loophole
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=./loophole http 80 --hostname mytestwebsite
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/loophole
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save this file as e.g. loophole.service and store it in /etc/systemd/system. You can start the service via systemctl start loophole.service. Use systemctl status loophole.service to check whether it successfully started. Finally, use systemctl enable loophole.service to make sure the service is started on every boot.

[msanaullahsahar]

Thank you @0x7f for quick answer. I did the same however the service returned the following error.

Failed to start loophole.service as the unit loophole.service has a bad unit file setting. systemctl status loophole.service displayed the following status about this service.

● loophole.service - Loophole
     Loaded: bad-setting (Reason: Unit loophole.service has a bad unit file setting.)
     Active: inactive (dead)

Nov 27 01:55:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: /etc/systemd/system/loophole.service:6: Neither a valid executable name nor an absolute path: ./loophole
Nov 27 01:55:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: loophole.service: Unit configuration has fatal error, unit will not be started.

Does this error means we can not execute the file loophole using ./? Are there other ways to run this without ./? I have tried with bash loophole and sh loophole but no luck. Any solution is appreciated and again thanks for your time.

[msanaullahsahar]

Ok. I replaced ExecStart=./loophole http 80 --hostname mytestwebsite with ExecStart=/home/pi/loophole/loophole http 80 --hostname mytestwebsite
Now i can start the service using systemctl start loophole.service but the service does not start itself on boot. Offcourse i have used the following commands after every change that I made.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start loophole.service
sudo systemctl enable loophole.service

I am stuck due to my limited knowledge of linux.

[Morishiri]

Can you check if systemctl status loophole.service gives more details this time? Is there a startup error or the service is not even started?

Additionally some time ago I was experiencing issues with services when they were started from user's home directory, try moving to file to some other location, e.g. /usr/local/bin or /opt, changing the path in service description and trying again?

[jmeri]

Or you could just add the line

@reboot /home/pi/loophole/loophole http 80 --hostname mytestwebsite > /dev/null 2>&1

to your crontab.