Rey Bango July 2nd, 2015

WebDev: How to Use NGROK to Test a Local Site for Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer

I recently wrote about RemoteIE which is a tool created to help developers on non-Windows OS’es to test for Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11. It uses Microsoft’s RemoteApp virtualization software to create a browsing session without the need to install a VM.  Developers have been sending us a lot of requests to expand it out to other versions of IE. One of the big limitations, though, is the fact that you can’t access resources or sites locally hosted on your development machine. This is a cumbersome limitation and narrows the usability of the tool for testing. It’s been nagging at me for awhile that we couldn’t use this in this fashion, but this past week I found a solution that I wanted to share.

ngrok – Secure Tunnels to Localhost

Enter ngrok, a very cool, lightweight tool that creates a secure tunnel on your local machine along with a public URL you can use for browsing your local site. When ngrok is running, it listens on the same port that your local web server is running on and proxies external requests to your local machine. This was the secret sauce I was looking for to allow RemoteIE to be able to test local sites on my Macbook. Getting it to work was simple. ngrok comes as an archived download and extracting it gives you the actual app. You need to decide where to place it. In my case, I moved it to /usr/local/bin which is where I prefer to keep my non-OS executables. You can place it anywhere as long as it’s available in your path or your symlink it. From there, it’s a simple step to get it to listen to your web server. Say you’re running your local web server on port 8080. In terminal, you’d type in: ngrok http 8080 which starts ngrok listening on port 8080 and creating the secure tunnel: It also creates two sets of publicly available URLs that map to your local web server: Forwarding http://5057493e.ngrok.io -> localhost:8080 Forwarding https://5057493e.ngrok.io -> localhost:8080 Dropping “http://5057493e.ngrok.io” or “https://5057493e.ngrok.io” (SSL) into your browser’s address bar should now bring up your local site. These are unique URLs that are created each time you restart ngrok making it easy to share these out for one-time testing sessions across a team. The benefit to this, of course, is that you’re now able to use RemoteIE with these public URLs to load and test your local site since to the service, your local site now looks like a staged or production website. We’ll continue to work on making RemoteIE easier to work with but for the time being this is a solid solution for getting around this limitation of the service. Update: My teammate Christian Heilmann just tweeted about ngrok for testing Microsoft Edge via a VM. Perfect timing since it also kickstarted some replies with alternatives.

More Hands-on With JavaScript

It might surprise you a bit, but Microsoft has a bunch of free learning on many open source JavaScript topics and we’re on a mission to create a lot more with Microsoft Edge. Check out my own: Or my team and colleagues: And some free tools: Visual Studio Code, Azure Trial, and cross-browser testing tools – all available for Mac, Linux, or Windows.
This article is part of the web dev tech series from Microsoft. We’re excited to share Microsoft Edge and the new EdgeHTML rendering engine with you. Get free virtual machines or test remotely on your Mac, iOS, Android, or Windows device @ http://dev.modern.ie/
Featured image source (dpe)

Rey Bango

Rey is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft focused on web development and open source projects. He's a former member of the jQuery Project Team. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter @reybango.

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