Make Local Web Server Accessible Online With Localtunnel

During the development stage, you may deploy the website in a local server. There you can run, develop, and debug the website on a computer, locally. But when your clients need to get access to the website immediately, or if one of the applications you need uses a webhook that has to be online to function, you probably wish that your local server could be accessible online. Making your local server available online is probably the fastest way to cope with this, especially if you have hundreds of files that you require access to. This is where a tool called localtunnel comes in. With localtunnel we can create a proxy that can tunnel to our local server, making it accessible from anywhere. Let's see how this tool works.

Installing Localtunnel

The localtunnel that we will be using here comes in a form of a Node.js package. So, you first need to install Node.js using the installer; you can download it in this page. Once Node.js installed, launch Terminal or Command Prompt and type this command below.

 npm install -g localtunnel

This command will install localtunnel globally, so it can be accessed in any directories at any level of your computer. Once localtunnel is installed, you should be able to access the lt command. To test the command, you can type the following (in Terminal or Command Prompt).

 lt –version

If the command works, it should return the localtunnel version installed in y [...]