ngrok VS localtunnel

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

localtunnel/localtunnel - Written in node. Popular suggestion.

Thanks for the history. I maintain this list[0], and wasn't aware of OG localtunnel, likely because there's a somewhat newer and now more popular project with the same name[1]. You appear to be correct on timing. Here's the earliest commits on GitHub for each of the projects:

OG localtunnel (2010): https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel/tree/fb82920d9d3e538...

Other localtunnel (2012): https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel/tree/93d62b9dbb9f...

ngrok (2012): https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok/tree/8f4795ecac7f92...

I'll see that OG localtunnel gets added to the list for posterity.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

[1]: https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel

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.

localtunnel — Expose locally running servers over a tunnel to a public URL. Free hosted version, and open source.

Localtunnel used to be a nice tunnel. It has gone through some enshittification lately.

> tunnel consent page now requires the tunnel creator's public IP in order to access tunnel content

https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel/issues/598

There are free non kafkaesque competitors out there.

I recently went through having to tunnel my development environment to setup an oauth2 flow for a rails integration. I found that using https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel was a better fit.

I prefer localtunnel: https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel

There's also Local Tunnel (http://localtunnel.me)

Not sure if it works combined with ngrok: https://www.npmjs.com/package/localtunnel