Tunnel local server to the public internet with https using Ngrok.

How to tunnel our local server to the public internet with https using Ngrok.

Table Of Contents

• 1. Introduction
  
• 2. Install and setup on windows system
• 3. Install and setup on linux system

1. Introduction:

It seems to be daunting if we need to test our application locally over Https. Generally, when we need to listen webhook from any other service provider, testing applications locally will be difficult. In this tutorial, I will show how to tunnel the local server into the live one using ngrok.

Create an account from ngrok from which we can get tunnel auth token which we will use to get persistent Https URLs even if the outage of the internet until ngrok is running.

2. Install and set up on windows system:

Download ngrok for windows system here and unzip. After that, you will see the ngrok binary file, to run that file double click it. Make sure the path of ngrok, you will see the command prompt as bellow.

Now you are ready to tunnel your local server port. Simply execute the following command.

ngrok.exe http 80

Here, port 80 is the server port running; you need to use the respective port of your running local server like 8080, 8090 etc.

We have successfully tunnel our local server running at port 80. We can see the two forwarding URLs which are accessible publicly. As we can see the session expires in about 8 hrs which means those URLs will be changes every 8 hrs; here we need an auth token to prevent this. Execute the following command.

ngrok.exe authtoken 5AXFH2DjGMu9NFHntjxZf_73wZyVZiKeCxrA1hwZWqX

Use your own auth token from your account instead. You can see the message in the command prompt.

Authtoken saved to configuration file: C:\Users\yourUser/.ngrok2/ngrok.yml

We will use this file to set up for multiple port tunnels. Now again run your local server port you will see the final tunneling URLs without session expires limit.

Now its time to tunnel more than one port if you need it. For this, we are using ngrok.yml config file as below:


ngrok.yml

tunnels:

 backend:

  addr: 8080
  proto: http
  
 frontend:

  addr: 8081
  proto: http

Here, I have running two applications on port 8080 and 8081. Now again run the ngrok.exe file and run the following command to start and tunnel all ports.

ngrok.exe start -all

We have successfully tunnel a multi-port server.

Note: if you get Invalid Host header error while running that URLs, start tunneling port with the following command instead:

ngrok.exe http 8080 -host-header="localhost:8080"

or

ngrok.exe http --host-header=rewrite 8080

For multiport tunnels

tunnels:

 backend:

  addr: 8080
  proto: http
  host_header: "localhost:8080"
  
 frontend:

  addr: 8081
  proto: http
  host_header: "localhost:8081"

3. Install and set up on Linux system:

Download ngrok for the Linux system here. Go to download path and simply right click and extract the file. You will see the ngrok binary file, we need to make it executable so, copy this file to usr/bin directory. 

sudo cp ~/Downloads/ngrok-stable-linux-amd64/ngrok /usr/bin/

Now type ngrok command in the terminal you can see the following output if it is successfully installed.

If it is not installed then go to the ngrok binary file path and open terminal and type command ./ngrok instead of ngrok to run and tunnel your server port.

For the persistent URLs, setup auth token using command:

ngrok authtoken 5AXFH2DjGMu9NFHntjxZf_73wZyVZiKeCxrA1hwZWqX

Use your auth token from your ngrok account, which will configure ngrok config file in your home directory.

Authtoken saved to configuration file: /home/36olearntocode/.ngrok2/ngrok.yml

If you want to tunnel single port then simply run following command and you will see the following output.

ngrok http 80

Use the respective port of your server.  

If you want to tunnel multiple ports then set up ngrok config file as:





ngrok.yml

tunnels:

 backend:

  addr: 8080
  proto: http
  
 frontend:

  addr: 8081
  proto: http

Now again run the command to start:

ngrok start -all

Output:

Note: if you get Invalid Host header error while running that URLs, start tunneling port with the following command instead:

ngrok http 8080 -host-header="localhost:8080"

or

ngrok http --host-header=rewrite 8080

For multiport tunnels

tunnels:

 backend:

  addr: 8080
  proto: http
  host_header: "localhost:8080"
  
 frontend:

  addr: 8081
  proto: http
  host_header: "localhost:8081"

We have successfully tunnel our two port 8080 and 8081 over https.