# How to Share a Gradio App — share=True, Spaces, and What to Do When the Link Expires Canonical: https://commareports.com/share-gradio-app Published: 2026-09-04 > Gradio's share=True link is a temporary tunnel to your laptop, and Hugging Face Spaces is public unless you pay for private. What each option really costs, plus publishing a static result page when the demo is over. # How to share a Gradio app `demo.launch(share=True)` prints a public URL and it feels like magic. It is worth understanding exactly what that URL is, because the surprise afterwards is always the same: the link stopped working, or the wrong person used it. ## What share=True actually does It opens a tunnel from a Gradio-operated relay to the Python process running on your machine. Three consequences follow directly: 1. **It dies when your process does.** Close the laptop, hit Ctrl-C, lose wifi — the link is gone. There is no cached copy of anything. 2. **It expires on its own.** The window has moved between Gradio versions — 72 hours historically, longer on recent releases — so check your installed version's docs rather than trusting a number in a blog post. It is always temporary. 3. **It is unauthenticated by default.** Anyone with the URL can call your model, burn your API quota, and upload files into your app's input path. `demo.launch(auth=("user", "pass"))` adds basic credentials, and that is worth doing every single time. It is an excellent tool for its actual job: showing a colleague something on your screen for the next hour. It was never a distribution channel. ## Hugging Face Spaces The durable version. Push the app, get a persistent URL, no laptop involved. The thing to check before pushing rather than after: a Space is **public by default**, repository included. Private Spaces exist on paid tiers. If the demo touches an unreleased model or customer data, set visibility first. Spaces on free hardware also sleep when idle, so the first visitor after a quiet period waits through a cold start. ## Self-hosting A container behind your own auth. Correct when the app is a real internal tool. A service to own, for what started as a notebook with a text box. ## The case none of these serve Very often the person asking for the link does not want to run the model. They want to see what it produced — the ten examples, the before-and-after, the eval scores — and say something about example seven. For that, the app is the wrong artifact entirely. Publish the outputs. ## Publishing the results instead Run the examples once, render them into a page: ```python from app import predict # your Gradio fn, reused directly cases = ["a photo of a cat", "a diagram of a transformer", "..."] rows = "".join( f"{c}" for c in cases ) html = f"""

v0.4 sample outputs

{rows}
""" ``` Base64 the images into the page rather than linking them. A self-contained file renders identically for every reader forever, with no host to keep alive. Then publish and keep one id: ```bash curl -fsS -X PATCH "https://commareports.com/api/v1/reports/$REPORT_ID" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $COMMA_API_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d "$(jq -n --rawfile html samples.html \ --arg title "Model v0.4 — sample outputs" '{title: $title, html: $html}')" ``` ## Why this is the better artifact for review Model review is comparative and slow. Somebody looks at example seven on Tuesday, someone else disagrees on Thursday, and the model changes next week. A tunnel that expires in three days cannot hold that conversation. A published page can. Reviewers pin anchored threads on individual outputs — "this one is the failure mode from the eval, not a regression" — and those threads persist across revisions as you PATCH new model versions to the same URL. The whole review history sits next to the evidence. Access is a setting on the report: [private, team, domain-gated or link](/docs/sharing) — no public Space, no open tunnel. And an agent attached through [Comma's MCP server](/mcp) can read the review threads and reply on them, which is how the eval loop closes without a human transcribing feedback. ## When to keep the app running Keep it when people genuinely need to type their own input — a prompt playground, an interactive demo for a customer call. Deploy it to Spaces or your own infrastructure, put auth in front of it, and publish result snapshots alongside so the findings outlive the container. ## Try it Comma is free — unlimited reports, unlimited commenters, unlimited revision history. **[Create your first report →](https://commareports.com/)** ### Related - [Share a Streamlit app](/share-streamlit-app) - [Share an LLM eval report](/agents/share-llm-eval-report) - [Share a promptfoo report](/share-promptfoo-report)