Often, especially when working with other people or when developing integrations with online services, we have to make our computer accessible from the Internet. This information could be obtained from our trusty router, but wouldn't it be easier if we just had a tool that makes our computer port publicly accessible?
Luckily for us there is such a tool!
Meet ngrok
, the versatile one line command that makes you forget about router configuration and continuous redeploys. Ngrok
is a simple tool that exposes a port from our computer to a unique domain name publicly available on the Internet.
How does it do it?
Well, let's see it in action!
Go to the website, click on the Download button, and choose your destiny. In our case, our destiny is the Linux package in 64-bit. Next, go to the terminal, unzip the file, and copy its contents to the bin
folder:
cd
downloadsunzip ngrok.zip
mv ngrok ~/bin
Now do a rehash and type the following:
ngrok http 80
We can see that port...