The power of SSH tunneling. How it can make your developer life easier

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Chances are that you’ve already used SSH a lot during your programming career. Whether it involved cloning a git repository or connecting to a remote server. Either way, both involving SSH on a basic level.

But beyond fetching a git repo or connecting to a server, SSH has some other purposes which may enhance your development workflow. One of them is SSH tunneling, also known as local or remote port forwarding. I’ll get into what it is and the difference between local and remote port forward.

Basic SSH

SSH stands for Secure Shell and is a program that is used to create a secure connection to a remote server. To create an SSH connection simply enter this command in your terminal:

ssh user@remote-server.com

user is the username on your server andremote-server.com is the hostname pointing to it, but you can also use your server IP address if you don’t have any domain name. After you’ve entered your password, you’ll be connected to the remote server with a secure connection.

Local port forwarding

As mentioned earlier there are two ways to establish an SSH tunnel. The first one is local port forwarding. To put this in simple terms — local port forwarding…