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Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

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Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#181
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped used ngrok because after opening the tunneled URL a few times it started saying "too many HTTP requests" on a Wordpress project. It is common for those to have many images/scripts/styles so throttling by number of requests makes ngrok unusable, now a happy localtunnel user.

ngrok has connection limits, but not request limits. Perhaps your server wasn't using keep-alive connections? It's mentioned in the pricing FAQ (scroll down a bit from this link): https://ngrok.com/product#pricing

Yeah my bad, it probably says "connections limit", I don't have time to figure out my way around it; other devs may do thought. I just want to fire it up and start working.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#182
post #168
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped used ngrok because after opening the tunneled URL a few times it started saying "too many HTTP requests" on a Wordpress project. It is common for those to have many images/scripts/styles so throttling by number of requests makes ngrok unusable, now a happy localtunnel user.

This seems like a problem with WordPress.

Not really, it was just an example; you can leave blank the Wordpress theme index.php and that way it makes only that request; the problem is more general: Real web sites are full of content (AKA. full of requests), that's just how it is.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#183

Nice tool, but without committing for annual billing (which I don't intend to do, not for the first year of usage) it's $10 a month. My internet connection, my mobile plan, my Photoshop & Lightroom subscription, a huge collection of music (Spotify), 3K~5K movies and TV shows (Netflix), etc., all cost approximately the same. I mean, sure, $120 a year is pocket change for somebody using Ngrok professionally, but that's…

The amount of time spent thinking about this and setting up an alternative vs just using ngrok, when billed at your market hourly rate, is far more than $10. This shouldn't be a real issue.

"Time spent thinking" counts for Ngrok too: comparing alternatives is a pragmatic thing to do, before pulling a trigger on something. Not to mention that this is all part of reading Hacker News (I found frp through some previous thread).

Setting up a VPS with frp on it would take 30 minutes tops (assuming that I don't already have one and that I'm in no hurry). Even if I was some big shot, doing $120 an hour, that's just 60 / (10 - 3) = 8.5 months of Ngrok. These $60 would be a good investment by my book.

But I'm not counting pennies here, I'm merely pointing out that the pricing is unreasonable. I can afford it, but its usefulness per dollar is disappointing.

For example, compose.com can host a Pg database for $17, one master and one slave, with automatic backups, a rich control panel, competent customer support, batteries included. It's maybe only twice as expensive as replicating the setup on your own (which would take literally weeks for a single person), and brings almost as much value as hiring a sysadmin. And then there's Ngrok, 3-4 times as expensive as DIY, while saving you a total of 30-60 minutes of one-time effort. And costs more than a half of a pretty great Pg server. Ridiculous.

Props to the people behind Ngrok, if they're in the black with this pricing. Good strategy/marketing.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure a lot of people using this don't even have a "security team." They likely have corporate IT that takes 2 weeks to add a DNS entry. Something complex like mapping a public IP to a dev server would take an act of $DEITY.

so register a new domain and set it up in route53? is there some corporate law that says you can't? just don't use your company's name in the domain name, make it something obscure.

Agreed. I personally don't have this problem. I have all my externally accessible dev servers on AWS. However, others are not so lucky.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the justification really "ssh flags are hard to remember"?

I'm not sure how you've interpreted the post that way. The point of that one specific thing was nothing more than to bring attention to the fact that even users who do have the skills to do this all by themselves often can't recall how exactly to get it all going without googling or reading manpages a bit, and that people who are less familiar with these things would be even less likely to know how to set up an SSH t…

If it comes down to flags, it's literally less than a minute of work to create an alias. So the comparison to mail servers and taxis is overblown.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#188
post #61

A lot of people seem to be a bit confused about the point of ngrok, why it's useful, how much it costs, etc. Let me try and help out. :) For me, the killer feature for ngrok is testing/developing webhooks. You install ngrok in your dev environment, start it up, then point the stripe/slack/whatever webhook your working on at the generated URL. ngrok will 1) proxy that request through to your dev environment 2) log the…

Not to mention you can quickly show somebody a url pointing to your internal dev web server without a public host name or opening your firewall.

Re: Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost

#190
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ngrok is open source as well: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok I've used localtunnel before but due to some misbehavior on windows (which i can't remember anymore), switched to ngrok.

Unless you setup your own ngrok server, you cannot use ngrok1, and ngrok2 is not open source

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