Out of Scope

rathole focuses on the forwarding for the NAT traversal, rather than being a all-in-one development tool or a load balancer or a gateway. It's designed to be used with them, not replace them.

But that doesn't mean it's not useful for other purposes. In the future, more configuration APIs will be added and rathole can be used with an external dashboard.

Make each program do one thing well.

• Domain based forwarding for HTTP

Introducing these kind of features into rathole itself ultimately reinvent a nginx. Use nginx to do this and set rathole as the upstream. This method achieves better performance as well as flexibility.

• HTTP Request Logging

rathole doesn't interference with the application layer traffic. A right place for this kind of stuff is the web server, and a network capture tool.

• frp's STCP or other setup that requires visitors' side configuration

If that kind of setup is possible, then there are a lot more tools available. You may want to consider secure tunnels like wireguard or zerotier. rathole primarily focuses on NAT traversal by forwarding, which doesn't require any setup for visitors.

• Caching local_ip's DNS records

As responded in issue #183, local_ip cache is not feasible because we have no reliable way to detect ip change. Handle DNS TTL and so on should be done with a DNS server, not a client. Caching ip is generally dangerous for clients. If you care about the local_ip query you can set up a local DNS server and enable caching. Then the local lookup should be trivial.