How to install and use Ngrok on Lubuntu 16.04

Ngrok is tunneling tool that can make your localhost accessible on the internet, it's a good way to test your local web app. If you are web developer you probably want to try ngrok, it can make your life easier. In this article i will show you how to install and use ngrok on lubuntu 16.04.

Ngrok provides easy way for developers who need to test their local development server, basically using ngrok, you can expose your localhost to the internet. Once ngrok is running on your machine, it will generate url that can be access in the internet pointing to your localhost.

On lubuntu 16.04, ngrok is available as part of the official repository, but i don't recommend you to install that one, because the ngrok in official lubuntu repo is the old version, i strongly suggest only use the newest version of ngrok.

Step by step how to install ngrok on lubuntu 16.04

• open web browser and go to ngrok website 
• go to download section and download ngrok linux 64 bit
• open command line, press CTRL + ALT + T
• extract the zip file and copy to /usr/local/bin (assuming the zip file is in ~/Downloads)

cd ~/Downloads

sudo unzip ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip -d /usr/local/bin/

• done!

Now you should be able to run ngrok command from anywhere, because the ngrok binary is already copy to /usr/local/bin/. Now that i have ngrok installed, how do i use it?

How to use ngrok

Let's say you have a local web server running on port 80, and you want to make that localhost accessible through the internet using ngrok, then you need to run this command:

ngrok http 80

ngrok http [port-number]

And then you can see if the session status is online, you will get an url forwarding with TLD ngrok.io, this is the url that you can access on the internet. Ngrok also generate local web interface on http://127.0.0.1:4040

You can monitor the traffic of your localhost connection, from the command line or from the web interface that generate by ngrok, pretty cool huh? ngrok is amazing tool!

Oh, one more thing, if your have local domain on your localhost, you can use the -host-header parameter to specify the local domain name, here's an example:

ngrok http -host-header=lubuntu.local 80

Tested and works well using ngrok version 2.2.4 on lubuntu 16.04.

~ cheers ~