Aral Balkan
I’ve been looking for an ngrok alternative for a while now that’s (a) affordable (b) easy to use and (c) works with Kitten¹. Today, after testing a bunch of them again and getting fed up, I found LocalXpose that checks all the boxes.
I signed Small Technology Foundation up as an affiliate so if you use this link to check it out, we’ll get 40% of your $6/mo pro account fee should you subscribe:
https://localxpose.io/?via=kitten
Aral Balkan
…Before this, I had set up a tiny VPS server that I installed WireGuard on that I was using to expose my dev server. It was a geeky exercise in setting up WireGuard, NAT/port-forwarding, etc. and it worked but with notable downsides:
• I could only use it from one computer at a time
• It meant my machine was removed from the local network so I couldn’t, for example, also control my Atem Mini Pro for streaming/recording.
LocalXpose doesn’t suffer from either issue.
Aral Balkan
@Azuaron The pricing, really. At one point I was paying ngrok ~$99/year for a pro account but that’s now gone up to $240/yr if you pay annually or $300/yr if you pay monthly so that’s way outside our budget as a tiny not-for-profit that doesn’t make any money to speak of.
LocalXpose costs $6/mo and allows multiple ports (80, 443) and pass-through TLS (which Kitten needs) and support WebSockets (which a few of the other alternatives failed with).
Azuaron
@aral Were you looking for additional options, or is there a downside to ngrok?
Aral Balkan
PS. I’ve now added this to the Kitten readme but if you are using LocalXpose to expose your Kitten server to the world, start it up like this (replacing <your domain> with, well, your domain:
loclx tunnel http --reserved-domain <your domain> --https-to localhost:443 --to localhost:80 --region eu
And then start Kitten up from your project folder with:
kitten --domain=<your domain>
(And remember this is just for exposing your dev server. You can also deploy to a public VPS, etc., with Kitten.)
Aral Balkan
@gabek That was one of the ones I tried out. Sadly, didn’t work for Kitten, which needs TLS passthrough and both port 80 and 443.
Otherwise, yeah, looks good :)
Gabe Kangas
Timo Tiuraniemi
@aral Hmm, doesn't seem to be open source? Their github at least looks outdated and can't find a link anywhere else either on their site.
Aral Balkan
@ttiurani I don’t think it is open source, no. But neither is ngrok (hasn’t been for a while).
Aral Balkan
@teleclimber Not for my needs with Kitten. I was basically going through the Awesome Tunneling (https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling) list and getting more and more discouraged until I found it.
@gabek just mentioned that http://serveo.net/ works him.
Good luck with your search :)
Olivier Forget
@aral Good to know about LocalXpose! Did any others come close to being suitable? I also need to find a solution to this, and ngrok pricing is just not workable. Thanks.
Aral Balkan
@astrobob Apart from my knee-jerk aversion to CloudFlare, I really don’t know. It’s not one I’ve tried. Do let us know how it goes if you do :)
Astrobob
@aral is this different from cloudflare tunnels. I've been looking for a similar solution and cf tunnels seems to be wildly recommended but they don't have exact limits on what you can use them for which is annoying.
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