Ngrok for api and web

Get Help and Help Others Show & Tell
1

I’m working with web hooks and OAuth from Slack and other services so I’ve been using ngrok to get my environment setup correctly for that testing. I wanted to quickly share my config because I ran into a limit with the current ngrok docs on CORS.

When I tried to run two different clients at the same time ngrok http 8910 and ngrok http 8911 I got an error from ngrok about my free account not supporting multiple clients running at once. However you’re able to run two tunnels with a single client and free account but you need to do it differently. And I actually like the different setup anyway.

Instructions

Find your ngrok.yml file by running this config check command:

ngrok config check

Open the ngrok.yml file in the location returned and add this:

tunnels:
  api:
    proto: http
    addr: 8911
  web:
    proto: http
    addr: 8910

Now you can start ngrok tunnels for both the web and api at once by running :sparkles:

ngrok start web api

:smile_cat:

Since I leave the ngrok terminal running off on its own, when I want to grab the URLs I use this:

curl -s http://localhost:4040/api/tunnels | jq '.tunnels[] | "\(.config.addr) --> \(.public_url)"'

"http://localhost:8910 --> https://b-l-a-a-a-h.ngrok.io"
"http://localhost:8911 --> https://b-l-a-a-r-g.ngrok.io"

Thanks!

2

Related — one of the reasons we implemented a set of test tools for Redwood Webhooks was explicitly to avoid having to setup forwarding like with ngrok.

See Serverless Functions (API Endpoints) | RedwoodJS Docs

WHY TESTING WEBHOOKS IS HARD

Because your webhook is typically sent from a third-party’s system, manually testing webhooks can be difficult. For one thing, you often have to create some kind of event in their system that will trigger the event – and you’ll often have to do that in a production environment with real data. Second, for each case you’ll have to find data that represents each case and issue a hook for each – which can take a lot of time and is tedious.

Maybe thee is something to reuse there to test without being connected.