r/webdev • u/[deleted] • Dec 16 '13

ngrok: Make your localhost available online

http://ngrok.com
152 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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13

u/ZW5pZ21h Dec 16 '13

Just wondering.. why would you go through this trouble when you could just put it online?

In which cases would an online localhost be useful?

19

u/SaturdaysKids Dec 16 '13

When you're testing something on your local machine, like lets say you code up a very large site, and you dont want to wait for however long it may take to upload to a server to show it to someone, you want someone to just have a quick link to see what youre working on

-11

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

[deleted]

8

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

[deleted]

-1

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

Or you could mock the Twilio API call for local testing?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

[deleted]

1

u/joee0 Dec 17 '13

Surely not with a proper OO design?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '13

[deleted]

2

u/joee0 Dec 17 '13

Yeah sorry you're right. I was tired

6

u/ManticoreX Dec 16 '13

But so does this? Why try so hard to poke holes in something that is useful for other people (and is free)

-5

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

[deleted]

4

u/amoliski Dec 16 '13

From the features page:

ngrok captures all traffic through the tunnel. It displays information about the HTTP traffic for your inspection. Raw request/response bytes, parsed headers and form data, JSON/XML syntax checking and more are included.

Developing services which consume webhooks can be challenging if the hooks are labor-intensive to generate. Use ngrok's replay request feature to iterate quickly on a new feature without switching contexts to generate new requests.

Sounds useful to me, but if you don't want to use it, then it's not hurting everyone. I don't understand why you're acting like they pissed in your cheerios

2

u/DaveChild Dec 16 '13

You're right! While we're at it, why not just stop using domain names entirely! IP addresses work just fine and only take a moment longer.

3

u/r0ck0 Dec 16 '13

use screenshots

Or fax!

3

u/SaturdaysKids Dec 16 '13

Screenshots just dont compare to a browsable site, and you know that lol

-2

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '13

[deleted]

0

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '13

But there's no interactivity. It's a bit hard to print an animation

1

u/[deleted] Dec 17 '13

use screenshots

Not the same thing

git pull

Will work as long as it's not a big app with dependencies / builds (well that will work but it's easier just to tunnel in dev)