Author here. I made this tool with the intention of making it easier to develop websites and webservices as well as easier to share projects you're working on with friends or at hackathons. Happy to answer any questions.
If so, the very first thing on the page should say: "Inspect the traffic to your web server with our free service", and then provide a little more detail like "We provide the public website. You just run our tool to connect your development site to us and watch the traffic flow in."
- You don't need to have access to a private server to use it.
- I've taken care of setting up SSL for you. So you can run your local server with just http but still have the entire public connection portion be encrypted.
- ngrok captures all of the http traffic over the tunnel, analyzes it and displays a local web interface for you to inspect the traffic.
- ngrok allows you to pick any request that happened over the tunnel and replay it to your local server. This is immensely useful for building webhook consumers.
- ngrok automatically reconnects if your internet connection is intermittent.
- It's written in Go so I can distribute it as a binary for all major platforms with zero dependenices.
I'll work on improving the copy. Thanks for the feedback!
One path would be a list like you provide above, a sort of "your situation / your solution" approach, something like:
You ... are developing a website/service your local machine
You ... want to allow friends to test from outside your LAN
BUT:
You ... don't want to open a firewall hole to your DEV machine
You ... want secure connections, but don't want to setup a valid cert
You ... don't want to bother with your own reverse proxy
AND
You ... do want an inspectable, replayable copy of all traffic
That's where we come in!
obviously my text is clunky, but that sort of explanation would help me understand what "hassle" you are helping me avoid.
The documentation says I'll only need this authtoken once, and upon subsequent calls, it'll read it from ~/.ngrok. But on my machine, no ~/.ngrok file was created and I need the authtoken param every time. Bug?
If there is a bandwidth or number of connections limit per domain/user (there should be, IMO), it should be in the front page.
There should probably be a bandwidth or connection cap, but I'm reticent to set one before I know what typical usage looks like. I would only want to set one up to prevent abuse of the service.