Dependencies:

• Ruby (with libopenssl) and Rubygems.

• A public key.

To get the dependencies, type:

sudo apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev rubygems1.8 libopenssl-ruby

If you have never made a public key, then run:

ssh-keygen

sudo gem install localtunnel

or to get the source:

git clone http://github.com/progrium/localtunnel.git

localtunnel [options] <localport>
  -k, --key FILE    upload a public key for authentication

Localtunnel is a client to a free and open source reverse tunneling service made specifically for web traffic. It’s intended to be used to temporarily expose local web servers to the greater Internet for debugging, unit tests, demos, etc.

This is how you make your local port 8080 public:

$ localtunnel 8080

Port 8080 is now publicly accessible from 8bv2.localtunnel.com …

Using localtunnel is comparable to using SSH reverse/remote port forwarding on a remote host that has GatewayPorts enabled, but without all the configuration or the need of a host. The localtunnel command works with a server component that is running on localtunnel.com, which is provided as a free service.

If have never run localtunnel before, you’ll need to upload a public key to authenticate. You do this once:

$ localtunnel -k ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 8080

After that, you shouldn’t have to use -k again.

Localtunnel can be started before or after the local web server. It tunnels through to the url given in that status message “publicly accessible from…” for as long as the command is running. The tunnel is closed if the command exits.