Set up a local web server with ngrok

When using Wagtail Live, especially webhook receivers, you will often need to register a public URL which messaging apps use to send new updates to your Wagtail site.

In a development environment, ngrok can help us expose a public web server and tunnel requests to our local server.

Downloading ngrok

Head to ngrok and download the version that corresponds to your platform.

Installing ngrok

To install ngrok, we only need to extract the file into a folder.

Extract the ngrok zip file into the folder of your preference. - in downloads/ngrok_folder for example -

Start ngrok server

Navigate to the directory where you extracted ngrok - in our example downloads/ngrok_folder - and then start the server as follows:

$ cd downloads/ngrok_folder
$ ./ngrok http 8000

If all goes well, you should see something like this:

ngrok by @inconshreveable                                     (Ctrl+C to quit)

Session Status            online                           
Update                    update available (version 2.3.40, Ctrl-U to update
Version                   2.35                                  
Web Interface             http://127.0.1:4040                             
Forwarding                http://4e0cd6d40780.ngrok.io -> http:localhost:8000
Forwarding                https://4e0cd6d40780.ngrok.io -> http:localhost:8000

Connections               ttl     opn      rt1     rt5     p50     p90       
                           0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Note

Most messaging apps will require the one that starts with https://.

You can now register a public-facing URL that tunnels to your local server.