Intro

As developers, we often face the challenge of testing our local applications with external services, webhooks, or mobile devices. Whether you’re developing APIs that need to communicate with AWS/GCP/Azure services, testing webhook integrations, or simply want to demo your work from different devices, exposing your localhost to the internet becomes essential.

This guide will walk you through two popular solutions: ngrok and LocalTunnel, showing you how to securely expose your local development server to the world.

What Are Tunneling Services?

Tunneling services create a secure tunnel from a public endpoint to your local machine, allowing external services to reach your development server without complex network configuration or deployment.

Common Use Cases

• Testing webhooks from third-party services (Stripe, GitHub, etc.) — You can connect your local code directly and debug it more efficiently.
• Sharing your work-in-progress with clients or team members — Instead of pushing it to some remote server. Useful in all the cases, where you are still ‘not ready’.
• Testing mobile applications that need to connect to your local API — A must have in almost all cases.
• Integrating with AWS services that require publicly accessible endpoints
• Cross-device testing and debugging