Set your own "ngrok alternative" on Heroku

When working on your web projects, you've probably encountered a situation where you need to deploy to a real server (with real domain name and SSL), and cannot run on localhost.

Before, I tried using ngrok and localtunnel for testing my chatbot. However, ngrok give me an unique address each time, and I have to go to the bot settings to change the webhook adress, which cost me some extra steps. On the other hand, localtunnel sometimes hangs. So, I'm not comfortable using both.

I finally came up with an idea: Heroku is stable and easy to deploy. Why don't we use it as an intermediate host? After a few days of searching through the internet, I found inlets, which is a very compact solution.

I created a repo capable of "Click-to-deploy" on heroku, for saving your time if you want to setup your own instance of inlets.

You can find that repo here: https://github.com/ngxson/inlets-heroku

If you find it interesting, please leave a Star!

Detailed instructions

You need an account at heroku. Sign up at: https://dashboard.heroku.com/

Visit https://github.com/ngxson/inlets-heroku

Click the Deploy to heroku button

Pick a name for your app, then pick a token (a.k.a the password)

After it's installed, download both the repo and extract it on your local machine: https://github.com/ngxson/inlets-heroku/archive/master.zip

Edit the run-windows.bat (or run-linus.sh) file in the client directory

Save the file, then double click to run. If you see the message below, then you have succeeded!

Now you can try accessing your app on heroku

Good luck!