Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrajav | Hacker News Reader

Looks pretty similar to ngrok, aside from the fact that ngrok has an unrestricted free tier.

(Looks like ngrok.com is down at the moment: http://web.archive.org/web/20140504031732/https://ngrok.com/ )

It looks also very similar to Localtunnel (https://localtunnel.me), except that Localtunnel is free and open source, so that you can run it on your own server. But Finch seems to be a little more user-friendly (easy forwarding of url's, for example).

ngrok is open-source too: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok

And that localtunnel.me is a Node.js "port" of the original localtunnel (which has been superceded by ngrok): https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel

My first thought too. Ngrok's traffic inspection stuff is pretty cool, and it doesn't look like Finch has that.

Vagrant Share is also a similar idea, though obviously tied to Vagrant.

Ngrok looks cool, too. The traffic inspection tool sounds really great. It's a pity it's website is down now. If this often happens it's pricing may be good, but maybe are other services better alternatives if you can't always you Ngrok.

I know Alan and have been using Ngrok for months now. This is the first time I've noticed a seriously long outage. The site seems to be back up now, FWIW.

You can pay for ngrok though (I don't believe there was a price forced, rather donate any amount (pay-what-you-want service as he states it). And the sites not being online currently might probably have to do with inconshreveable (the author) updating it, as he stated in a tweet recently.

Also, I'm not sure but did ngrok provide the endpoint over ssl?

Yep, ngrok provides SSL endpoints for everyone automatically.

Or Anvil, which runs flawlessly and super simply. http://anvilformac.com/

Also completely free.

Also sort of like xip.io

xip.io doesn't tunnel anything, it just creates convenient DNS records.

Anvil is a great tool for making sites accessible on the local machine and local network, but it does nothing to make your sites accessible from the Internet, especially if you're behind a NAT or a dynamic IP. Finch and the other mentioned services here do, so it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

EDIT: typo

I might just be unlucky, but the few times in the past where I've tried to use either ngrok or localtunnel - they've been down.

ngrok is amazing and open.

do these support sni/https correctly? Last time I checked localtunnel/ngrok, it did not. Pagekite does.

When it's not down, like now or most of the time. :(

I used ngrok pretty heavily a couple months ago for a period of weeks and it never never down when I was using it. This is the first time I've ever seen ngrok (service or site) down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com