| Author of the project here. I want to clarify why this project exists (as many seem to point out that other projects or methods exist for doing this). TL;DR; If you think of localtunnel as just a shitty ngrok (or name your project here), you are missing the point and probably don't have the same use cases I do. 1. It was made overnight at some hackathon because I was not satisfied with the other tunneling options I found. They required either an account or some stupid ssh setup. I got to thinking of ways to create a tunnel that simply had an CLI tool and instantly get a tunnel no setup. It worked, I kept it. 2. It is written as a library first, CLI tool second. This means it can be used to create tunnels in a test suite if you want to use services like saucelabs to run browser tests (see https://github.com/defunctzombie/zuul). This is leveraged by projects like socket.io and engine.io (among others). This is perhaps the main reason I keep it around despite there being alternative CLI tools. 3. Both the client and server code are availably and easy to install and use. Companies do this when they want to run their own tunnels for privacy (or whatever their reasons... I don't care). 4. Yes, I know the name is identical to the old ruby?python? one. Whatever. That one seems defunct now anyway. |
ngrok doesn't have a programmatic API, but I'd love to add one soon. I've built out a library for this in https://github.com/inconshreveable/go-tunnel that will be the foundation for ngrok's next version providing a library in addition to the CLI tool.
Unfortunately, one of Go's weaknesses is that it doesn't embed into other languages like C, so I'd need a ground-up rewrite (in C, probably) with bindings to other languages.
If ngrok the command-line tool had a well defined programmatic interface (like RESTful JSON) would that useful, or is the burden of a separate binary/process to manage still too painful?