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DO App Platform behind a Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel

Posted on July 22, 2025

I have a static front-end and a compute back-end on the DO App Platform. I’d like to put it behind a Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel. I created a Droplet and installed the Cloudflare docker and the tunnel is healthy.

My questions are-

  • Do the App Platform deployments live on my VPC network?
  • If so, how can I find their IP address?
  • How can I turn off public access to App Platform apps? (static and compute)

We really like the ease of auto-deploy when the App Platfom is linked up to bitbucket- so I don’t want to have to build an image and host on a droplet.

Any thoughts or best practices are appreciated.



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Hey!

If I remember correctly the DigitalOcean App Platform apps don’t live inside your VPC, so you won’t be able to get internal IPs or restrict access via VPC-level controls. That also means you can’t natively route App Platform traffic through your Cloudflare Tunnel the same way you would with a Droplet.

There’s a feature request open for this exact thing, VPC support for App Platform apps and managed services: 👉 https://ideas.digitalocean.com/app-platform/p/vpc-with-apps-droplets-and-managed-databases

Make sure to upvote it!

Until then, one workaround is to place your App Platform backend behind Basic Auth or IP filtering (via headers + app logic), and tunnel via a proxy Droplet using your Cloudflare tunnel setup, though that adds some complexity.

Hope this helps!

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