Ever need to give someone a URL to access a server running locally on your machine? Perhaps you had to forward ports or mess with some SSH reverse tunneling. Next time try ngrok!

There are a few ways to accomplish this, but ngrok is the most streamlined and feature packed way yet I’ve found to open up a local port to the world; perhaps for testing by a client or friend, or testing web hooks from services that can’t access your internal network.

Here’s how to get started:

ngrok 4567

You should see something like this:

And it’s capable of so much more:

Require username/password

 ngrok -httpauth="helmet:12345" 80

Use specific subdomain

ngrok -subdomain=example 80

Forward to non-local services

ngrok 192.168.0.1:80

Forward traffic other than HTTP

ngrok -proto tcp 22

Inspect and replay traffic

open http://localhost:4040

Run your own server!

https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok/blob/master/docs/SELFHOSTING.md

Bonus: its written in go! So its fast and dependency free! Binaries are made available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.