ngrok

ngrok packaged as a Ruby gem! This is partly to allow easy installation (although hopefully ngrok should be installable with homebrew soon), and partly as a fun proof-of-concept.

This doesn't currently work on Windows.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ngrok'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself with:

$ gem install ngrok

Usage

Start your ngrok tunnel like normal:

$ ngrok 8000

For full usage examples see https://ngrok.com/usage.

Why?

Why not just install the ngrok binary normally? E.g.:

curl -O https://dl.ngrok.com/darwin_amd64/ngrok.zip && unzip ngrok.zip -d /usr/local/bin

Pros

• One line to install & uninstall (with gem uninstall)
• Manage multiple versions of ngrok on your system
• Automatically selects the right binary for your OS
• Works with Bundler

Cons

• Gem contains multiple binaries (so it's a bigger download)
• No Windows support (yet)
• The gem installs ngrok in a bit of a crazy way (see below)

How?

The binaries for the various OSes are kept in the /vendor directory. When the gem is installed, we detect the current OS with Rbconfig (adapted from Selenium) and select the right binary.

Then we set up a daemon that watches the file system (with listen), to wait for the placeholder (Ruby) binary to be installed, and replace it with the appropriate ngrok binary.

If there's a more elegant way to make this work, please let me know :smile:! Just open an issue or pull request.