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Discussion on: Expose your local 💻 web server to the world 🌐

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Giorgos Kontopoulos 👀 • Edited

@andreasweber if you don't mind please share your thought we one would choose ngrok over solutions above. Or please share why you have actually fallen in love with it.

Thanks for stopping by

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Andreas K. Weber

There are several reasons, but I must admit, I've never searched for another tool or solution to expose my local services to the open world, without having the hassle configure a bunch of things. Ngrok just works for my use cases.

I heavily rely on third party software to develop web applications (like Auth0 as identity management solution). Most of them send back status updates via webhooks. To reduce overhead and time spent setting everything up I use the custom subdomains feature of Ngrok. With this enabled I am able to configure a consistent webhook endpoint and don't have to reconfigure my development setup, after I stopped the tunnel, to get it going again.

Moreover, with Ngroks local ui I can capture and replay requests. That's awesome to simulate real webhook requests again and again. With one of the latest updates Ngrok implemented the possibility to modify requests before replaying them.

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Giorgos Kontopoulos 👀

@andreasweber I guess localhost.run and serveo.net are for simpler use cases than. I did not know ngrok had all those bells and whistles but again I never had the need for them and wanted something very simple.

Thanks for the write up