It’s not just a large, unwieldy command you have to do every time, but you have to make sure sshd is set up properly in order to make a public tunnel on the remote machine. The idea is great, but it’s a hassle to set up. When people connect to a port on your public machine, it gets forwarded to a local port on your machine, looking as if that port was on a public IP. To some, the solution is obvious: SSH tunneling! That is, use a magical set of options with SSH on a hosted box to set up a tunnel from that machine to your local machine. Demos are a surprisingly common case, especially for multi-user systems (“Man, I wish I could have you join this chat room app I’m working on, but it’s only running on my laptop”). Webhooks aside, there are other cases where you might need to make local web servers public, such as testing or public demos. With the growing popularity of HTTP callbacks, or webhooks, there are cases where you can really only debug your app while live and on the Internet. Whether you’re running Apache, Mongrel, or the App Engine SDK, we’re all starting to see the benefits of having a production-like environment right there on your laptop so you can iteratively code and debug your app without deploying live, or even needing the Internet. These days it’s fairly common to run a local environment for web development. This week we thought we’d share some background on localtunnel, a project I wrote outside of Twilio to help deal with the challenges of developing against webhook-based APIs (such as Twilio’s) when coding behind a NAT.
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