Sharing sites publicly

Sometimes you need to show a local site to someone who isn’t on your machine — a client, a teammate, a webhook from a third-party service. Butler can put a local site on a public URL with a single command.

Share a site

butler share my-app

Butler opens a tunnel to my-app.test and prints a public URL. Anyone with that URL reaches your local site until you stop sharing. Omit the name to share the site in the current directory.

Stop sharing when you’re done:

butler unshare my-app

Providers

butler share is provider-neutral — it can tunnel through Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) or Expose, whichever you have configured. For direct, low-level control over the Expose client, Butler passes commands straight through:

butler expose ...

Use butler share/butler unshare for the common case; reach for butler expose only when you need Expose-specific options.

A public URL is public

While a share is active, anyone with the URL can reach your local site — and, if your app talks to it, your local database and services behind it. Share only what you mean to, and run butler unshare when you’re finished.