Password protection allows you to prevent random members of the public from accessing your site: ngrok http -auth = 'username:password' 80Ĭustom subdomains are for when you don’t want to have to remember that randomly generated URL! If you sign up to a paid ngrok plan, you can reserve a subdomain so others can’t take it. That will re-run a request for you over the tunnel. You can even replay a request by clicking the Replay button on the right. The very basic layout of this when loading a simple HTML page looks like this: My favorite use of this is seeing JSON data returned back from requests. You can click each request on the left and see details on the right for the headers and other data. You’ll access a dashboard showing inbound requests. One of the more unique offerings ngrok provides is the ability to inspect past traffic. Open that URL on any device with an internet connection and you’ll be accessing your localhost from the Web! In the example above, we’ve got traffic to a randomly generated ngrok address of being forwarded to our localhost on 127.0.0.1:80. Run the following command to create a tunnel to your localhost on port 80. Open up a command-line terminal and go to the folder you extracted ngrok to. Below are the basic steps, but if you’d like more details, we have another article on “ How to Use ngrok to Share a Local Development Site.”

Go to, download the archive and extract it to wherever you’d like ngrok to live on your computer. One key advantage to ngrok is that it has no dependencies. Ngrok’s plans as of May 2021 look like so: Otherwise, you’ll be able to use the service, but will be given a random domain such as the URL in the virtual host sample above. In order to use custom subdomains and reserved domains, you’ll need to sign up for a paid plan. You can use basic features for free and then sign up to access more advanced features. Ngrok is an application for Windows, macOS and Linux that creates a tunnel but also allows you to inspect all traffic that goes through the tunnel and replay that traffic for testing.

Setup a local web server mac