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 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?
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.
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.
It's important to know that your content, intellectual property, and possibly confidential user data including full http request/responses are being proxied by this service. Their privacy policy is vague about what they will do with this information other than to say they will collect and process it:
"In running and maintaining our website we may collect and process the following data about you:
Information about your use of our site including details of your visits such as pages viewed and the resources that you access. Such information includes traffic data, location data and other communication data.
Information provided voluntarily by you. For example, when you register for information or make a purchase.
Information that you provide when you communicate with us by any means."
I think that all of these type of services are able to access your content. Maybe the don't do so, but unless you run this on your own server, your data is in principle accessible by the service.
Agreed. Just want to point it out to those that jump in head first without understanding the consequences of that action. You might get fired from your job for doing this or severly reprimanded. You might unwittingly cause a production data breach for some reason you never even imagined. So it's a message of be careful and understand fully what you are doing.
You'd need to tweak the server for this to actually work. By default, remote forwarded ports are not accessible from other hosts, and non-root cannot listen on port 80.
Or give everything an ipv6 address and just use DNS. Once you get accustomed to every VM and every container and every little experiment having a routeable IP address life gets easier.
Allocate a /64 to any machine that runs VMs or containers. Then I tend to just run radvd which will broadcast the prefix so that hosts can auto assign; for virtual hosts letting them auto assign based on mac address is usually fine, as the mac address is random or you assign explicitly (explicit is often easiest). Its fairly simple, just get ipv6 and start using it...
You would normally have to explicitly unfirewall any service; I run my ipv6 as inbound ssh only. Although crawling ipv6 is pretty hard compared to ipv4.
Basically one of either outcomes happen:
1. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and one project gets renamed. Users are happy. Packagers are happy.
2. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and neither compromise. Users of both projects (intersection of the sets, rather than union) are pissed. Packagers are even more pissed, and put in an annoying and difficult situation, and forced to come out with weird hacky solutions to appease users. (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614907)
To any of you who read this and find yourself naming a project in the future, do your users some justice and at least do some cursory Googling before settling on a name. And please don't pick annoying-to-Google names like + or * or - or _ or some other one- or two-character name.
Yeah, I came across `natpmpc` when I discovered the Airport Express at the office does not support uPNP. Our new Asus N66U supports NAT-PMP so I thought maybe it was more common these days.
Once they roll out paid plans, their 20 hour/month plan is $15/month. And (at least based on their pricing page now) you don't get reserved subdomains until the $25/month option, so you end up getting a random URL whenever you set a site up (again).
I’ve been using Finch for quite a while now, and I absolutely love it. As a lot of people have pointed out, there are several alternatives and/or competitors. But, as @lachgr points out, Finch is very user-friendly, which—to a designery type like me—is invaluable.
I've made the trip from localtunnel to pagekite to ngrok.. Ngrok is the greatest of all time. Being able to intercept, modify and replay is a life safer when debugging webhooks.
Like I said for the last one of these, your own VPS or server plus 2 lines of Nginx config plus ssh -R gets you the same thing with no additional dependency. And you control the domain name.
(Looks like ngrok.com is down at the moment: http://web.archive.org/web/20140504031732/https://ngrok.com/ )