We recommend building bot behaviors and webhooks in a local development environment before deploying them to production. This allows you to test without risking unexpected changes to your live data.
Ngrok is a cool service for creating public URLs of the local sites. This service comes handy when we want to share our local work to remote customers. Sometimes the developer needs this for the testing local site in different devices. Following are the steps to install ngrok in Mac. Oct 14, 2018 Step 0 - Install Homebrew. Homebrew does not come pre-installed with Mac, so you'll have to install it yourself. Thankfully, it's a single line of code that you paste into the terminal. Here are instructions on how to install Homebrew on Mac. Approach #1 - Install Up-To-Date JDK. Update 10/24/20: java was migrated from homebrew/cask to homebrew. Create an automated work wit h Mac Automator to auto start ngrok in Mac startup. Just add a terminal command to work. Add exact locations for your files, here is my command: /usr/local/ngrok/ngrok. Similar Software for Mac. Install growly on Mac OSX; Install rfcdiff on Mac OSX; Install idnits on Mac OSX; Install wget on Mac OSX; Install ngrok on Mac OSX; Install irrtoolset on Mac OSX; Install inspircd on Mac OSX; Install internetarchive on Mac OSX; Install wtf on Mac OSX; Install Private Internet Access on Mac OSX.
Your development machine may be behind a firewall or assigned a dynamic IP address. This makes it difficult to test functionality like webhooks where a remote server needs to directly access a URL on your machine. It also makes it difficult to use other testing tools like BrowserStack1 that run against a publicly accessible URL.
You can solve these issues with ngrok2 – one of our favorite development tools. You can use ngrok to quickly and easily create a temporary public URL for sharing secure access to your local machine.
To get started, you’ll need to download ngrok from their website and unzip it. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.
On Linux, you can usually install ngrok from your package manager (e.g. apt, yum).
On Mac, you can also install ngrok using Homebrew3 (note: you will need to install via brew cask install ngok).
Starting ngrok is incredibly simple:
Above, we’re starting ngrok in http mode using localhost on port 80. You can replace these values according to your needs.
When ngrok starts, it generates an HTTP and HTTPS URL for you to use. This means you don’t need to hassle with configuring SSL on your local development machine.
You can copy these links from the console and use them like any other public URL.
Paste your ngrok HTTPS URL into your web browser. If you have a copy of Cerb running on localhost:80 then you (and anyone else) will be able to use it as if it was installed on a public web server.
If you’re testing webhooks, you can copy the ngrok version of the webhook URL from Setup » Services » Webhooks after logging in. You can then paste this URL into any app or service that supports webhooks.
Ngrok Mac Brew 2019
ngrok also has a web interface that starts on http://127.0.0.1:4040 by default.
This allows you to inspect incoming requests and outgoing responses, which is incredibly helpful when you’re debugging functionality like webhooks.
You also have the option of replaying a previous request from this web interface, which makes your job a lot easier when developing webhooks. You won’t have to waste your time constantly triggering an event and waiting for the webhook request to show up.
ngrok is free to use, with some limitations. You’re limited on the number of connections per minute to your machine, as well as the number of tunnels and processes. On free plans, your tunnels will also always use a random hostname.
They offer paid plans to increase these limits, as well as enabling the use of reserved domains and IPs, and providing priority support.
Ngrok Mac Brew &
BrowserStack: Live web-based browser testing - https://www.browserstack.com↩
ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost - https://ngrok.com↩
HomeBrew: The missing package manager for macOS - https://brew.sh↩