HTTP Tunneling with ngrok

Before your application can take advantage of features that depend on incoming webhooks, you'll need to setup an HTTP tunnel using a service like ngrok.

Use a Paid Plan

You should specifically sign up for a paid account. Although ngrok offers a free plan, their $8/year or $10/month paid plan will allow you to reserve a custom subdomain for reuse each time you spin up your tunnel. This is a critical productivity improvement, because in practice you'll end up configuring your tunnel URL in a bunch of different places like config/application.yml but also in external systems like when you configure payment providers to deliver webhooks to you.

Usage

Once you have ngrok installed, you can start your tunnel like so, replacing YOUR-SUBDOMAIN with whatever subdomain you reserved in your ngrok account:

ngrok http --domain=YOUR-SUBDOMAIN 3000

Updating Your Configuration

Before your Rails application will accept connections on your tunnel hostname, you need to update config/application.yml with:

BASE_URL: https://YOUR-SUBDOMAIN.ngrok.io

You'll also need to restart your Rails server:

rails restart