teleport

teleport - like ngrok but reverse

ngrok is awesome. For those not in the know, ngrok addresses a use case where you want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet. Say you want to show your work to a colleague not on the local network - just run ngrok http 3000 (assuming you're running your local server on port 3000) and you're given an HTTP address on the Wild Wild Web that you can share with your colleagues.

Except things sometimes won't work this way - sometimes things in your project only really work when run on localhost. This is the problem teleport wants to address. It creates a TCP tunnel to a remote endpoint and passes connections from a selected port on the localhost (3000 by default) to the remote endpoint. This is a perfect companion for ngrok.

Developer A wants to show her work:

$ ngrok tcp 3000  # gets an address like 0.tcp.ngrok.io:42644

Developer B wants to look at A's work from the cosy confines of his localhost:

$ teleport -r 0.tcp.ngrok.io:42644

Now for as long as this is running Developer B can access localhost:3000 locally and connect via a magic gateway to Developer A's server. Note that teleport works on TCP level so you will need to expose a TCP port with ngrok.

Of course nothing requires you to use teleport only with ngrok - teleport will work standalone just fine so you can connect to a server running on your VPS as long as you can access it from your local machine.

Installing

If you have Go installed on your system you can use Go's package manager to install the newest version binary by running go get -u github.com/codequest-eu/teleport. Otherwise there are pre-built binaries for the plaftorm of your choice available here.