Current favourite tool: ngrok

• Have you ever wanted to share something still in development with a product manager, project manager or even another developer just so they could give it a quick click through, maybe give you some pointers, nothing too intense?
• Have you ever been working with a third-party service (Mailchimp, SendGrid, SparkPost, Twilio, Authy, the list goes on…) and want to use a webhook to channel data around on a dev site?
• Have you ever been giving a dev talk and thought “it would be great if people could just access this site I’m running locally”, but you don’t want to deploy anything?

Ngrok is the answer. It’s a command line tool that gives access to your local server using a secure URL and an excellent debugging/inspection panel to boot.

It is the best thing. No, really. I am prone to occasional geeking-out on technology-fronts (a certain ramble about how finding the perfect monitor configuration could equate to finding true love springs to mind), but trust me on this one.

Reasons why you should love ngrok as much as I do:

1. It’s free! (I mean, you can pay if you want custom subdomains etc, but for most development/testing needs the free version is where it’s at)
2. It’s as easy as cmd ngrok http 80 and boom, you’re up and running
3. But what if you’re running on IIS express? That’s super easy too: ngrok http -host-header="localhost:[port-number]" [port-number]
4. The inspection panel is unexpectedly helpful, I’ve never felt so supported by a tool. I mean, I love Fiddler, but there’s just so much functionality I often feel like I’m shortchanging it a bit... (like someone built me a mansion and I’ve moved into the larder to live)

Just to be clear, I am in no way affiliated with ngrok or it’s devs, I am just excitable when it comes to speeding up my own dev processes!

Download it here: https://ngrok.com/download