There are occassions when you want to expose a local port to the world
so it can be accessed publicly on the internet.
For example, if you want to:
- Share you local development environment publicly
- Be able to receive webhooks from external services for your local development environment like Stripe webhooks
- Expose a local database to the internet via a remote server
One option is to log in to your router, typically https://192.169.1.254/ or something similar,
and configure port forwarding. That will let you tell the router to take incoming traffic for
a specific port and send it your local computer. This can be annoying because you have to undo
the change when you are done, which is easy to forget about, and you may not have access to
your router with admin privileges at all. You can also run in to port conflicts.
Another option is to use a remote host, like a VPS rented from a service like
Digital Ocean to expose your port to the internet.
You can do this by using SSH port forwarding (tunneling) to securely forward a port
from your local computer to a port on the Digital Ocean VPS. In turn,
you can expose that port on the VPS to the internet.
This example is like an exercise in setting up your own ngrok service.
