Ever had an issue while developing a website / API locally and wanted to test a webhook or do integration without actually publishing your application?
Or maybe you wanted to show a client a demo of your project but didn’t want to do a staging server or publish your website online?
Or you wanted to do App development on your physical device (not emulator) with APIs hosted locally on your machine ?
Or maybe you are setting up a server for a client remotely and don’t want to keep asking the sysadmin to open / close ports so you can make sure everything is working?
Ngrok is one of the oldest and most reliable tools that I use almost daily for local development and testing. It is a reverse proxy that is perfect for quick testing and development of APIs, backends, websites, etc…
You can run it on Linux, Mac and Windows and target whatever port you have locally to expose it online on a public URL. There are many other use cases, you can checkout them out here.
Their free plan is quite generous but if you are using it heavily, you can easily run out of requests (20,000 HTTP/HTTPS requests per month). Their personal tier is great value at $8 per month.