ngrok is awesome!

I don’t know if I’m the last one to the party, but if you haven’t checked out ngrok, do yourself that favor!

In short, ngrok is a secure tunneling application which lets you expose a web application publicly with essentially zero setup.  You can always configure a server, deploy to the server, test against the server, read the logs… 

If you want a faster process, download and unzip ngrok, then run this on the command line:

X:\ngrok> ngrok http [port]

Then get on with your life.  ngrok will generate a custom [http/https]://*******.ngrok.io subdomain for your process and you can connect immediately.  Best of all, it’s free!  There are paid plans, and they’re well worth the low price IMHO.

If you’re using IIS Express, you’ll want to include a host header command:

X:\ngrok> ngrok http [port] -host-header=”localhost:[port]”

TL;DR, this is required due to the default binding information in IIS Express.  Thanks to, and please check out, Devin Rader’s excellent write-up for a better explanation as well as alternate methods of working with IIS Express and ngrok!