ngrok VS Anthias

Many good reverse proxy solutions currently exist on the market such as ngrok and Cloudflare tunnels. They give one the ability to reliably run a tunnel and ensure it does not go down. They also offer the ability to securely access their links using whitelisted IP addresses or by using HTTP Basic Authentication.

These is a very common problem. Luckily, it's been solved already. My go-to tool for this was ngrok or localtunnel. Both of these tools are great, but they didn't fit my needs perfectly.

Ensure your app works as expected and provides a good user experience by thoroughly testing and debugging. Utilize tools like Chrome DevTools or Firefox Developer Tools to inspect and modify your app’s code, network, and storage. Employ tools like ngrok or localtunnel to expose your local development server to the internet, enabling testing on various devices and browsers.

ngrok

Tunnels (CloudFlare vs. Ngrok)

We need to make our WhatsApp API accessible on the internet so the trigger.dev cloud service can connect to it. We can do that by running ngrok in a separate terminal.

This means that Cronitor must have an endpoint that it can reach. Normally, we can't do that when developing on a personal machine. For this tutorial, however, we can use ngrok to establish a tunnel to our local Django application for testing purposes.

There are so many weird suggestions in the comments. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned ngrok https://ngrok.com/ (there are many competing alternatives as well). It makes exposing local service over HTTPS trivial. It's been used heavily in most of my engineering orgs.

Ngrok: This provides about 2hours on the free account but requires account registration and adding your authtoken, and starting it is as simple as running ngrok http 8080

I used ScreenlyOSE Anthias + BalenaCloud on about 7 Pi devices to manage a small-scale DSS rollout. BalenaCloud allowed fleet-wide updates, etc. and a rudimentary VPN tunnel to connect to each Pi. It might scale to 4,000, but you'll spend a lot of time babysitting that.

There’s also screenly which is open source and has a paid version if you want more advanced features: https://anthias.screenly.io/

Anthias is the free version of Screenly: https://anthias.screenly.io/

We used to use the Open Source Edition of Screenly. If you're okay with managing each display separately by IP it might be a workable option, though time consuming. Paid version offers a centralized CMS, but I haven't tried it.