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I have used it for Appointment Reminder development. It is fundamental to the architecture of the app that Twilio needs to be able to fire HTTP requests agains
by patio11 12y ago
I have used it for Appointment Reminder development. It is fundamental to the architecture of the app that Twilio needs to be able to fire HTTP requests against my app, live, when my Twilio phone numbers get called/SMSed. Making HTTP requests against a laptop is hard. Ngrok lets me register a subdomain with Twilio and say "OK, Twilio API, when the dev number is called, hit this URL on this subdomain. It forwards to a laptop but you don't have to know that."
It is also useful for more prosaic cases like, in a Campfire room, "Hey, I have a new design on localhost. Can you sanity check it for me? foo.ngrok.com/the/page/goes/here"
- MBCook 12y agoTwilio is how I learned about it. I needed to do development on their API that supported callbacks. There were three options: a) Use ngrok and easily get an externally accessible tunnel to a web server running on my dev machine so I could test and make changes b) Get sysadmin to setup some kind of port forwarding to my local machine or a reverse proxy to my local machine c) Deploy test software (over and over and over) to a non-critical server and try to do the debugging there. Of course this would also need the database (or the ability to connect to the one on my dev machine). b & c would have been messes. They would have taken a long time, involved all sorts of security issues, etc. Instead I fired up ngrok, did my testing, closed it back down and was all set. Perfect testing, direct connection just like prod would be (no reverse proxies or anything), ability to snoop the traffic easily with Wireshark, etc. For development or showing a fun little project to some friends quickly it's an amazing tool. Honestly, the possible 'evil' uses of it (like phishing) never occurred to me.