1. Overview

The method discussed in this article is not an alternative to hosting sites on cloud, its just a temporary way of sharing the website while it is under development phase.

2. Setup

We are going to use localtunnel to expose our localhost to the internet.

• Step-1: Download and Install npm from here. Note: Node installer includes npm.
• Step-2: Install localtunnel using following command

npm install -g localtunnel

Note: You may need to add 'sudo' before npm in linux/mac systems.

This will install localtunnel globally. Read more about localtunnel here.

3. Expose localhost

For demo I am going to use a react based website, and run it on port 3001.

Now the site is running on localhost, next step is to expose this localhost's port to internet, to do this we will run the following command on terminal

npx localtunnel -p 3001

Replace '3001' with the port number your site running on

This command will generate a link, this link can be visited in any device in any location and will redirect to the localhost's port on our localsystem.
Note: We need to keep serving the website on our localsystem's port.

4. Conclusion

Clearly this method is not an alternative to hosting the site on cloud, but can be very helpful for sharing websites/webapps, while they are under development. While setting up OAuth using facebook it requires redirect url with 'https' so localtunnel can be helpfull in this scenario too.

[1]: localtunnel