What is Ngrok and How to Set Up Ngrok for Local Development

Ngrok is a technique where developers are able to share their development server over the internet securely. It develops a web address which forwards all traffic to a particular port in your local computer. This is mainly useful when verifying webhooks, APIs or when working on a shared project with friends without having to deploy your project on a separate host server.

• Secure Tunnels: Uses HTTPS and encrypted connections to promote secure transfer of data between it and the user.
• Webhook Testing: Makes testing of services such as Stripe, GitHub, or Twilio for instance easier especially as they require to act like a public URL to handle incoming webhooks.
• Custom Subdomains: Presents the ability to setup own URLs for your tunnels (Paid subscription).
• Analytics Dashboard: It presents real time traffic conditions that would be useful in debugging and monitoring.

Step 1: Install Ngrok

Visit Ngrok's official website, and download the binary for your operative system. Install the downloaded package:

• Windows: Save it to a folder, and create a System Environment Variable which will be the path to the ngrok.exe.
• macOS/Linux: Extract the archive and move it to /usr/local/bin or a directory of your PATH list.

Alternatively, use a package manager:

• On macOS: sudo brew install ngrok h2, ngrok 

• On Ubuntu: oneclick@oneclick:$ sudo snap install ngrok 

Step 2: Authenticate Ngrok

• Create an account at the Ngrok website for free.

• Once you are logged in, go to Dashboard > Your Authtoken.

• Authenticate Ngrok by running the following command in your terminal:

 oneclick@oneclick:$ ngrok config add-authtoken YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN 

Step 3: Start a Local Server Make sure you already have a web server accessible from your localhost and it is running specifically at a particular port. For example:

Node.Js / React.js

Laravel

Python

 Step 4: Start an Ngrok Tunnel 

• Make sure you already have a web server accessible from your localhost and it is running specifically at a particular port. For example:

• http 8000: Command that instructs Ngrok to create a tunnel that forwards all the requests received on port 8000.
• After running the command, Ngrok will display output like this:

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