Making a Local Web Server Public with Localtunnel

There was a post about <a href="https://showoff.io/" rel="nofollow">https://showoff.io/</a> here not long ago. Seems they are doing quite similar things, except showoff.io costs a little. I didn't really compare features, though.

i understand the case where you don't have a box with e.g. port 80 available and need to use their server as an endpoint, but otherwise is it really that hard to remember ssh -L and -R syntax as the article suggests?<p>i also don't really see where you'd need to tunnel and serve production traffic from your dev machine versus having a proper staging environment and testing there. that has "bad idea" written all over it.<p>&#62; we’re all starting to see the benefits of having a production-like environment right there on your laptop so you can iteratively code and debug your app without deploying live, or even needing the Internet.<p>actually, real professionals have seen these benefits for ages. that is SOP for good programmers.

This is probably a bad idea. If you don't have access to or control over your local firewall, there is most likely an organizational reason for that (security). Opening up your development webserver to the public Internet without asking permission from your IT department first is a good way to either get hacked or to at least make some enemies within your corporate security department.<p>If you have access to your firewall, why not just open it up yourself?

I wrote a post a little while ago about DIYing this for people doing Rails/Rack apps on Mac who've got an nginx box public somewhere. It also uses a wildcard DNS trick to let you do all your apps with a single tunnel<p><a href="http://pogodan.com/blog/2011/05/03/reverse-ssh-tunnel-any-rack-app-with-pow-and-nginx" rel="nofollow">http://pogodan.com/blog/2011/05/03/reverse-ssh-tunnel-any-ra...</a>

I like that this makes it easier to steal unreleased code, demos, etc by just enumerating all possible subdomains of localtunnel.com that are 4 alphanumeric characters long.

PageKite.net does something similar

ok, I've use it for over a year now and it works well, but I still don't get why it gets reposted here for the 4th time.