Share localhost with anyone

Ever wanted to quickly share your localhost server with someone else, without going through the hassle of deploying it somewhere?

You’ll be happy to know that there’s a really simple way to do this. First install the localtunnel gem:

$ gem install localtunnel

Next run your localhost server, for example in Rails, using the default WEBrick server:

$ rails s

Or Python:

$ python - m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

The first time you run localtunnel you’ll need to use one of your public SSH keys:

$ localtunnel -k ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 8000

You’ll see something like this in your terminal:

➜  project_name git:(develop) localtunnel 8000
   This localtunnel service is brought to you by Twilio.
   Port 8000 is now publicly accessible from http://xxxx.localtunnel.com ...

Now just share http://xxxx.localtunnel.com with whoever needs to see your work.

Subsequently you can just use localtunnel <port> to generate a public URL:

$ localtunnel 8000

And that’s it. Install and setup takes less than 5 minutes, and it works beautifully.