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Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost
- inconshreveable 9y agoHiya there folks - I'm the creator of ngrok, happy to answer any questions
- macsj200 9y agoSo how exactly does the tunneling service work? Is it something like LogMeIn Hamachi? From what I understand, you need an intermediary server between two nodes in the network to create a connection like this. So do you have to pay hosting costs to create this pipeline?
- inconshreveable 9y agoYes that's correct, ngrok hosts servers around the world that serve as 'relays' which accept connections on your behalf and then copy the bytes through to a persistent connection initiated by the ngrok client. It's the same principle as a reverse SSH tunnel
- wiradikusuma 9y agoWhat's the advantage of using ngrok if I can just add entry to my own domain, say bla.anyofmydomain.com -> 123.123.123.123?
- inconshreveable 9y agongrok's value is for services that don't have public IP addresses (anything behind a NAT or firewall)
- ghayes 9y agoCan IPv6 address help address this issue in some circumstances?
- inconshreveable 9y agoCertainly, although even with complete adoption of ipv6, i suspect we'll still see most networks locked down to prevent incoming connections
- jdeb 9y agoIt will definitely be interesting to see how public internet providers (airports, coffee shops, etc) handle IPv6 in the future. Will they leave their LAN_IN firewall open and leave filtering to the client, or will we keep the status quo and filter at the router?
- Svenskunganka 9y agoIt takes care of NAT/Firewalls, so you can sit on the airport if you wish and share something you work on locally. Even if it's your own home network, you'd have to go through the process of forwarding ports, have a static local and external IP, configure either a web server or a local proxy. I'm in no way affiliated to ngrok, I just think it's an awesome piece of software and use it regularly.
- bigbugbag 9y agoAre you sure about this being possible on airport provided networks ? My experience with airport networks is that pretty much everything is locked down and you can't set up anything from the airport.
- vidarh 9y agoIt'll work from everywhere that allows an outbound connection. You're right there may be issues if you can't ssh out, but most airport networks I've been on has allowed ssh. It'd be a good idea for them to support tunnelling over SSL too, though.
- ryall 9y agoDo you mean: "why can't I set up port forwarding on my firewall, then create a DNS record for my domain that points to my current IP, then wait for that to propagate around the internet before I can use it, then do it all again when I move from e.g. office->home or my IP changes because of my ISP"? No reason.
- bigbugbag 9y agoMan you'll be floored when you'll learn about this thing called dynamic DNS, and even better it's been around for 20 years ? more ? Anyways my ISP has provided me with a fixed IP for about 17 years.
- hmage 9y agoMan you'll be floored when you'll learn that 90% of people going online never have a "real IP". Servers see the IP of the NAT's most of the time. ngrok doesn't require an outside-accessible IP.
- ryall 9y agoYou're still going to need to set up port forwarding on the firewall of each site you develop at, and if you use DHCP with no static assignment... more fun. Honestly it depends on your use case, port forwarding and dyndns is trivial to configure, but if you're using development time to do it more than a few times then it's a non-trivial efficiency leak
- kevinburke 9y agoThere are really nice features like a local request log, a replay button, a debugger, automatically good TLS, &c &c.
- Arcsech 9y agoHow does this compare to https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ ?
- peterburkimsher 9y agoIs localtunnel free?
- Arcsech 9y agoIt seems to be!
- inconshreveable 9y agosame idea, great project. folks pay for ngrok because it's 1) more reliable 2) more featureful
- notgood 9y agoI stopped used ngrok because after opening the tunneled URL a few times it started saying "too many HTTP requests" on a Wordpress project. It is common for those to have many images/scripts/styles so throttling by number of requests makes ngrok unusable, now a happy localtunnel user.
- clouddrover 9y agongrok has connection limits, but not request limits. Perhaps your server wasn't using keep-alive connections? It's mentioned in the pricing FAQ (scroll down a bit from this link): https://ngrok.com/product#pricing https://ngrok.com/product#pricing
- notgood 9y agoYeah my bad, it probably says "connections limit", I don't have time to figure out my way around it; other devs may do thought. I just want to fire it up and start working.
- 9y ago
- tmd83 9y agoCorrect me but there seems to be a free vs. paid plan? Seems free vs. paid is about reserving/custom domain vs. random one and a lot of security related feature. But the basic tunneling works for free am I correct in that? Also what does the user really mean in terms of ngrok concurrent user or kind of named seat.
- cormacrelf 9y agoI'm a paying customer, I emailed you a few days ago about ngrok being quarantined as a trojan by Windows Defender. Do you have a response on that?
- inconshreveable 9y agoplease file a false positive bug report against windows defender. there's not much I can do about that if they're misclassifying ngrok
- cormacrelf 9y agoAlright. Reported. MMPC17050619803367
- mablap 9y agoWith due respect, shouldn't you be the one filing the report? I mean, that's a potential loss of quite a few clients there...
- cormacrelf 9y agoA report's good, but I care more about assurance of the integrity of the software I was running than having Windows Defender not quarantine my stuff. My build server has been remote-inaccessible all week when a simple 'no compromise of binaries that I know of, quite sure it's a false positive' would have sufficed.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoBeen there in the past. You need users to report this. As an app developer you have very little leeway.
- bdcravens 9y agoHappy paying customer :-) Can you speak to security? I love using ngrok to test stuff in dev that requires SSL without having to setup up SSL. Of course that means it's running through your cert. Obviously one shouldn't run anything protected through your system, but what is your visibility into that traffic?
- Cozumel 9y agoWhy not just setup SSL in your development environment? It's seriously not that difficult at all, there's zero reason to use Ngrok (although I'm sure it does what it does very well), plus asking this question after you're already paying is kind of silly.
- bdcravens 9y ago> asking this question after you're already paying is kind of silly That assumes this is my only use case for using ngrok :-)
- bigbugbag 9y agoWhat is the point of ngrok besides being a paid for third party single point of failure and security liability ? The website says it is for exposing a local server behind nat or firewall to the internet. 1. local server is by definition supposed not to be exposed to the internet 2. to expose a server behind a NAT there's this thing called port forwarding 3. to expose a server behind a firewall there's this thing called a DMZ or correctly configuring the firewall There's a lot of data collection happening, the privacy policy is leading on the weak side. Is there an option to opt out of all this data collection so when comes the time to disclose, sell, give or share data I can be guaranteed my data or any data generated by my use of ngrok will not (you can't share something you don't have)? What makes ngrok better than a free software tunnel solution I can use by myself with no third party involved ? What about IPv6 support ?
- shimo5037 9y agoI don't think you're the target audience. Think of a front end developer working on a mobile site. Now, in an ideal world everyone would know how to set up an SSH tunnel, but let's be real here, even you probably have to look up the exact flags you're supposed to use every time you want to set up one. Combine this with the need for a publicly accessible server somewhere, and it should become somewhat clear that many simply do not possess the skills, resources, and/or couldn't be bothered to go through the trouble. With ngrok, you just download a single binary, make it executable, and you're ready to go. It's easy enough for most, although I suspect a GUI would further increase its reach. Corporate policies often prevent employees from connecting their private phones to the internal network, so simply accessing the internal IP isn't really doable. You might be able to apply to have your device whitelisted, but that may take days, perhaps weeks, and even if you're approved, it doesn't really help as you cannot show your work to others (e.g. your team lead) without having their devices whitelisted as well. You might argue that everyone should have a company-provided phone with access to the network, and that's certainly a solution. Realistic? At most companies, probably not. You might have shared phones but who wants to work like that? Plus, there are developers who feel more comfortable playing with their own phones anyway. Regardless of which and whose device they have, they'd still be limited to WiFi only. Sure, you can emulate slower networks, but that's one more thing to know about. With a tunnel, you can see how the thing you're working on feels over a real 4G connection with no additional configuration. All this while developing locally with no need to waste time deploying to a separate environment. That's just one use case where ngrok shines. The fact that you do not need to "correctly configure a firewall" is a selling point. Does it circumvent the firewall and expose machines on the internal network? Yes it does, and that's certainly a concern. But since people are people, perhaps you should have a similar, easy to use service available for your developers so that they don't have to resort to third party services you have no control over.
- bertjk 9y agoHow big is the company? Is it just you? Do you have employees?
- nachtigall 9y agoThanks for creating ngrok. Sharing my experience and use case: I tried ngrok (and localtunnel) two months ago to show a localhost WordPress site. Both failed because WordPress uses absolute links to reference css, js and img assets. So the site was visible under whatever.ngrok.com but the assets where still linked to localhost. I read the FAQ at https://ngrok.com/faq#wordpress https://ngrok.com/faq#wordpress and tried all the mentioned plugins plus some other hacks. None did work. In the end I wasted almost one day. I ended up renting a Simple PHP Hosting for 2 days to which I cloned the site. Which was also half a day but only cost me 2 € (site was online only for 2 days or so) and in the end, it did work.
- jwr 9y agoHey -- great utility! Feature request: a way to kill an existing tunnel. I often forget to take down a tunnel established from a home machine, and then while working on my laptop I find myself locked out. I'd love to be able to optionally kill an existing tunnel and replace it with a current one.
- jqueryin 9y agoTLDR: your pricing model change lost a customer. Used to use your paid version until the new pricing model. I don't use it often enough to warrant paying, so I just setup the old version on my own VPS.
- bmh100 9y ago”I want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.” This is genius. It immediately simply told me exactly what your and service does. A few common, short examples beneath that would also be great. I would see this being great to show off an app on the development branch to a client in a meeting.
- Posibyte 9y agoI don't have a question, but I did want to thank you so much for this service. For our usage, which involves lots of disparate services sitting in all sorts of places, it makes it quick and painless to shuffle around our graph of connections between them for development, debugging, and production testing. It's a service that, for us, is worth its weight in gold for all the configuration and maintenance we don't have to do. It's definitely one of the first tools in our toolbox we reach for. Thank you very much for ngrok!
- ptr_void 9y agoThank you for making this awesome tool, it has been quite useful to me.
- stevemk14ebr 9y ago3 important questions: 1) My university blocks LogMeInHamachi which is the main tool i've tried to get around hosting behind a NAT. Will this likely be blocked too, or is it not possible to tell without trying 2) Is there any costs associated with this. Do i ever need to pay 3) Does the person connecting to my server also require a special client or does this appear to them as any standard connection would.
- l2dy 9y ago> 2) Is there any costs associated with this. Do i ever need to pay See https://ngrok.com/product#pricing https://ngrok.com/product#pricing.
- stevemk14ebr 9y agoslightly less excited now :(
- henrikschroder 9y agoI'd rather pay a very small amount for something that does exactly what it says on the tin, every time, than some sketchy app that maybe works, or monetizes in weird ways by selling me or my traffic or whatever. It's a professional tool with real use. That's worth money.
- an_account 9y agoDid the free option go away? (On my phone now so I can't try it out.)
- stpe 9y agoFree option is still there (listed below the plans).
- brianshaler 9y agoBelow the paid options: Free Plan For quick demos and other simple tunneling needs. * HTTP/TCP tunnels on random URLs/ports * 1 online ngrok process * 4 tunnels per ngrok process * 40 connections / minute
- samcheng 9y agoIt's possible to roll your own ngrok clone via SSH tunnels, a publicly-available server somewhere, and autossh. This is basically ssh-tunnel-as-a-service.
- corv 9y agoor vpn which has better performance due to udp
- yeldarb 9y agoHappy paying ngrok user here. Love it for developing anything using webhooks and also hybrid mobile apps (I have my app pull the JS from the Dev box I'm working on via ngrok without having to rebuild the app or deploy the code anywhere). It significantly speeds up my workflow!
- ryall 9y agoAgreed! This is gold for debugging webhooks and prototyping APIs. Pretty much a "me too" post but just wanted to express my appreciation to the dev
- tomashertus 9y agoI'm surprised that ngrok is something new for HN community. Anyway, happy customer here! Recommending this product whenever I go:) It has became an essential part of my workflow.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- greg5green 9y agoI almost forgot how useful it was for working with webhooks! One of those things I forget about until I've been banging my head on my desk for a couple hours.
- roylez 9y agoI used to use Ngrok, then I discovered ultrahook which gives me a persistent endpoint, for free.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vhost- 9y agoI really like ngrok. I use it a lot. I just really dislike how the TCP tunnels work. With HTTP you get a unique subdomain which makes it harder for people to just scan and connect. With TCP, it's always 0.tcp.ngrok.io, so you can just scan that domain and connect to anything that's open.
- gls2ro 9y agoI'not currently using it (so I did not test this) but seems like you have the option of custom TCP as I can see here https://ngrok.com/product#pricing https://ngrok.com/product#pricing for Pro account.
- mmccaff 9y agoI use the -subdomain argument for this available in the Pro version and it works perfectly.
- packetized 9y agoLiterally the most terrifying service for any security-minded operations-focused person. Wonderful tool, interesting and useful in a dizzying array of aspects - but dear lord, I've had some real horrific moments when users told me that they installed it to allow access to their (private) repos for testing.
- ageofwant 9y agoIf your users have to resort to this they are not getting the appropriate support they need. If your users are productive, chances are so is the company that pays both your salaries. If your users have to fight their infrastructure people to get their jobs done, you company will fail to effectively compete against those companies that don't. It astounds me that so few security people understand what their purpose is: Your purpose is to assist the company you work for to keep on existing, and even make a profit. If you disempower those that are most effective in helping the company do what it does you're effectively destroying your own livelihood, and everyone else that is dependent on it.
- DonbunEf7 9y agoUh, no. The purpose of a security team is to prevent data from being exfiltrated from the company's control. Passwords, PII, HIPPA/other-compliance-controlled stuff, source code, etc. are all at risk of being stolen at all times, which means that security is a game of constant vigilance. And since everybody has at least a bit of this data under their control, this means that everybody is involved with security. (At least two of my past employers have had the motto, "Everybody is on the security team.") Productivity means nothing in the face of data exfiltration. You only have to fail once at guarding a password in order to be completely compromised. If we seem tightly wound, it's because we have fully internalized and grok the stakes of our efforts and the entailment of failure. "Our infrastructure sucked, so I used an insecure tool to leak our credentials to third parties, because I couldn't be productive otherwise!" is not really a valid excuse in this light, since there's no amount of productivity which offsets data exfiltration.
- 9y ago
- jeremejevs 9y agoNice tool, but without committing for annual billing (which I don't intend to do, not for the first year of usage) it's $10 a month. My internet connection, my mobile plan, my Photoshop & Lightroom subscription, a huge collection of music (Spotify), 3K~5K movies and TV shows (Netflix), etc., all cost approximately the same. I mean, sure, $120 a year is pocket change for somebody using Ngrok professionally, but that's still super disproportional, compared to, say, monster of a piece of software like Photoshop. I'd probably subscribe for $2, but otherwise, IMO, frp [0] on a $3 VPS [1] is better value, with the extra benefit of being FOSS and having zero limits. [0] https://github.com/fatedier/frp https://github.com/fatedier/frp [1] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing https://www.scaleway.com/pricing
- marmaduke 9y agoI came here to mention Scaleway ARM servers which cost 3/mo with unlimited bandwidth. With reverse SSH tunneling, there's no need for a dedicated service.
- kuschku 9y agoThis issue gets worse if you use multiple such services. Alone they’re worth it, but combined... IRCCloud (4$) + ngrok (10$) + some free libre email provider (5$) + 1TB cloud storage (10-12$) + ... The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of what I’d pay for the services, I have far more performance, and can offer these services to 10 people at no cost, and still come in better. These services might be worth it if you’re in SV, but 10$/mo is something different to a person earning 300k$/year in SV, and to a student earning 8k$/year somewhere else. ________________________ [1] Server price and performance comparisons between several hosters, previously featured on HN: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...
- marmaduke 9y agoThe 4 core ARM would probably be sufficient for what you listed, unless you anticipate touching the data going through (e.g. transcoding videos etc)
- PacketPaul 9y agoHow much is the paid service? You could roll your own for around $15/month using an Amazon EC2 T2 micro instance.
- stefanhuber 9y agoUse a hidden service! I manage many intranet servers over tor. You have no problems with nat or firewalls and it is free! Ok it is slower, but for many things like ssh it's great...
- nejdetckenobi 9y agolong time ngrok user here. used several times to show my prototypes to the others. It's simpler than deploying on heroku (or anywhere actually), and is without restrictions ofc because you use your own hw.
- andreiw 9y agoCool. Where's the ARM64 linux build? That's more important than the legacy 32-bit ARM builds (i.e. ARM servers)
- kyboren 9y agoPSA: if you want to provide remote access to a local service, but don't want the potentially-terrifying security implications, use Tor Authenticated Onion Services (AKA "HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient" [0]). On a machine on the LAN, install Tor and set up an authenticated onion service, and point it to the desired endpoint. In order to access the service, clients need a manually-loaded encryption key (and Tor, of course). Without this key, nobody will be able even to discover your endpoint, let alone actually connect to it. [0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec.txt https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec.txt
- sethammons 9y agoHow does that work for webhook testing? They are just going to POST to a url you give them...
- Lazare 9y agoA lot of people seem to be a bit confused about the point of ngrok, why it's useful, how much it costs, etc. Let me try and help out. :) For me, the killer feature for ngrok is testing/developing webhooks. You install ngrok in your dev environment, start it up, then point the stripe/slack/whatever webhook your working on at the generated URL. ngrok will 1) proxy that request through to your dev environment 2) log the request 3) log the response 4) let you replay previous requests. It could not be more helpful for developing webhook handlers, and has literally saved me hours of work in the last couple of months alone. Finally, the free tier is all you need for that; it gives you a unique ngrok subdomain which changes every time you start the tunnel and some (generous) usage caps, both of which are fine for this usage. People pointing out the potential security issues are correct, but that's an argument to be careful and think about what you're doing. Besides, what's your proposed alternative? Because most of the obvious ones have equally troubling issues.
- planetix 9y ago> Besides, what's your proposed alternative? Setup a proper development environment that mirrors the production environment?
- nevi-me 9y agoIf you don't have a static IP that's internet-accessible, and that which you can arbitrarily point your domain to, how would you go about doing this? Some, if not most, services won't allow you to redirect cold to an IP address, they want some domain of sorts. There are alternatives, but I think "setup a proper dev environment" alone misses the point of what ngrok does. The 'easiest' alternative I've tried before was to VPN into my Linux box to get a static internal IP, use a spare domain for the webhook then internally redirect the webhook traffic to my local machine. In the end I'm achieving what ngrok is doing (and none of it involves setting up a proper dev environment, cos I would already have one anyways), but I'd like to hear of better alternatives :)
- tjoff 9y agoSurely you've heard of dynamic DNS?
- prodicus 9y agoAwesome! OT but can anyone suggest some free tools using which I can make similar diagrams. They look pretty cool :)
- jonthepirate 9y agodocker run -ti -e 'PROXY_TO_ADDR=http://www.example.com/' http://www.example.com/' jonthepirate/ngrok:latest ^ that expression will expose a local docker powered web server, assuming www.example.com is the local dns name on your docker network. Enjoy.
- yasn77 9y agoI prefer the implementation of http://localhost.run http://localhost.run To me it seems a lot cleaner, simply use SSH rather than download any app
- sandGorgon 9y agoI'm a happy paid user. If I had one request, it is for a different pricing and better management for groups of users. People like me would like to buy 5-10 licenses and manage them centrally. Define shared endpoints and individual endpoints,etc
- stummjr 9y agoNgrok is just awesome! A huge shout out to the developers!
- saintfiends 9y agoTheir 1.x is open source: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok This is a similar open source alternative: https://github.com/fatedier/frp https://github.com/fatedier/frp Both written in Go.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoYet another needless cost of not switching to IPv6 already ...
- jdeb 9y agoEven with IPv6 you might still have a firewall that you don't control.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoEven with IPv6, you might get issued a work laptop that has software installed to randomly delete some of your files. Well, yeah, of course, incompetent or malicious company IT can prevent you from being a productive developer and you may then feel the need to work around that, that is largely orthogonal to whether the world is using IPv6 or not.
- tmp98112 9y agoMakes me sad to see all the negativeness towards this service, which clearly works and serves a need some people have. Yes, there are alternatives, but I hate when people jump to dismiss service like this, without fully considering what issues the proposed alternatives have. Obviously it is ok to mention the alternative options, but that can be made in constructive way. Let's celebrate the fact that somebody has built and released something and even seems to have a business model to support it. Instead of complaining about 5-20 bucks per month, try to figure out how you could channel some of your corporate multimillion IT budget to this fellow hacker. Wouldn't it be great if building and running this kind of small solutions would be actually a viable way of making living?
- xg15 9y agoThe title of this submission makes it sound like a selling-fridges-to-eskimos scam product - you need to read quite a bit to find out what's it actually about and that it solves (or simplifies) an actual use-case. I think a better comparision is with DynDNS services: It sets up a public host connected to your own machine - but unlike DynDNS, the host doesn't point to your machine's IP directly. Instead, requests are routed through a proxy/tunnel, so your machine can be kept behind a firewall and is only available through the public host. (I figure, the proxy allows for some more neat tricks, such as restricting ports/urls/etc or holding requests open while your machine changes IPs.)
- ausjke 9y agoNever used it, what's the difference between ngrok and using DMZ with port-forwarding? are they the same thing? What's the technical advantage other than it is easy to use? I can port-forwarding easily on my router to expose whatever port to the public, why do I need ngrok? With a DDNS + Port-forwarding you can easily have what Ngrok provides? or am I missing something?
- hrktb 9y agoFor me ngrok spares me all the talk with infra team to have the public port exposed and the setup of a test server just to for a mere 10 or 20 calls I need to receive from some new service I am checking. I use it to prototype webhook entry points, and only need to receive a few call to have a quick confirmation I receive what I expected from the docs. Once I have enough info I can start building a more solid project and jump through all the hoops to have it on a real server with a subdomain and a public facing interface and all the security needed etc. I'd just hate to go through the whole process first, only to discover the service is unusable for my purpose, or the data I receive doesn't make any sense.
- 49531 9y agoI've used ngrok for a while now, and I love it. I used it just last night to test out some webrtc stuff I was doing. Was able to get friends from around the world on video chat served from localhost within seconds. It's also super handy when building webhooks, you can use the unique URL to test out apis without having to deploy anything. I can't rave about it enough.
- leesalminen 9y agoI've been on the free tier for a while and have been meaning to upgrade to show support for such a great service. Seeing this post this morning reminded me. Upgraded for the year!
- YPCrumble 9y agoA fantastic open-source javascript alternative is localtunnel (https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel). I've used this more often than ngrok after ngrok became a paid service.
- jaequery 9y agoyeah im in the same boat.
- itaysk 9y agongrok is open source as well: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok I've used localtunnel before but due to some misbehavior on windows (which i can't remember anymore), switched to ngrok.
- berdario 9y agoUnless you setup your own ngrok server, you cannot use ngrok1, and ngrok2 is not open source
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- enraged_camel 9y agoNgrok has a paid tier, but the main service is still free.
- adamson 9y agoI've been using this for web server testing since 2012. It's probably the paid tool that's given me the most bang for my buck in terms of hours saved
- nbrempel 9y agoNgrok is one of the most valuable development tools in my toolbox.
- avh02 9y agodid a spit-take when i accidentally read "deployment"
- yannis 9y agoFor a part-time programmer Mechanical Engineer, it is such a gratifying task to use ngrok. I first came across it a couple of years back. Great Project, great development, open sourced and well written in go. https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok/tree/master/src/ngrok https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok/tree/master/src/ngr... It takes two seconds to deploy an application in the evening from my kitchen table, check it also on my mobile and the next day access it from work also and show it to co-workers. Call it "usability" for Engineers!
- bespoke_engnr 9y agoI see some people arguing that "you should use a dev/staging environment with a public IP" instead of having ngrok tunneling traffic directly to your local dev box. When you're editing HTML/CSS, you don't have to run a deploy script before checking how your markup renders. Ngrok gives people writing web services the same convenience when dealing with requests from a 3rd party on the Net. It is the equivalent of saving your HTML/CSS source files and instantly seeing the changes when you reload your browser. I just wrote a little proof-of-concept Alexa app that crawls HumbleBundle ('Bundled Goods', very much beta quality at the moment) and ngrok was invaluable for developing it quickly.
- pfista 9y agoNgrok is the coolest tool I use on a pretty consistent basis. Developing webhooks locally is usually what I use it for, and the web interface replay capability is amazing. The creator gave a great talk on why he built it and how it progressed over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_xNOVY96Ng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_xNOVY96Ng
- DAddYE 9y agoA lot of negativity but I found this tool super useful when developing for Alexa and test out my scripts. Keep it going guys!
- joantune 9y agoI have been using this for quite a while and it's really useful. Even though I have VPSs available, where I could make a SSH tunnel, this is simply way more convenient, so I end up using ngrok a lot for development
- andkon 9y agoI love this product page so much! Great illustrations, a wonderful balance of levity and clarity about ngrok's purpose.
- JohnnyConatus 9y agoLove ngrok. The ngrok npm package makes it easy to put into a local dev startup, too.