When working with external API’s, testing application with mock request was one way. So when I want to test with a live API I was forced to host it on public (Not really!). One easy solution to this is using ngrok which basically is a Tunneling/Port forwarding software which has such an humble setup.

Tunnel

All we have to do is Download–>run ngrok http 5000. That’s it!!

All we did was exposed port 5000 over http to the outside. Once you run the command it would create an endpoint for the outside world (internet) which would look something like this

http://9e844545.ngrok.io

It can do more than that. To find out more probably you can dig through these docs to start with.

Now that you have an endpoint to share to the outside world, we can use this URL and set webhooks so that external apps can post data to this endpoint.

-Photo by Burak K from Pexels