Tag: ngrok

As Web Developers, we need to know how to work with HTTP from every angle. I gave a 2-hour tutorial at PHP UK that included some of my most trusted tools - but it was sold out and a bunch of people asked me if there was video (there wasn't, tutorials make little sense when videoed). Instead, I thought I'd try to set out a self-study version of the workshop (I rarely teach these days so I'm unlikely to deliver it anywhere else).

There's a slide deck, some exercises and a sample repo on GitHub ... let's dive in!

I'm a huge fan of Ngrok, a tool to create a secure tunnel to your laptop. It is brilliant for testing, well, anything running locally really. Someone asked me about my setup recently and I'm using a couple of config files to keep things quick and consistent, so I thought I'd share here what I shared with them.

You can use a central config file for ngrok, and/or specific config files for each project. I use both, so I'll show you around my setup.

I'm a regular and happy user of Apache CouchDB, so much so in fact that I'm writing a library to talk to it from PHP. While working on tweaking a feature, I realised that the laptop I use for development didn't have the right/enough data on it to test …

I'm a huge fan of ngrok, a tool that allows you to open a secure tunnel from your machine to the outside world to enable testing APIs and things. Mostly I use virtual machines for development, but by default the ngrok dashboard is only available when requested from the machine …

Recently I was hastily building an API for a client and I wanted to run some tests against it. I've written before about using Runscope for API testing, but this was against a local dev platform (inside a VM, not directly on my laptop) rather than a public API. The same problem arises if you want to access a local site or API from elsewhere or from a mobile device. In all these scenarios, ngrok is your friend.