This article aims to be a comprehensive guide on installing and setting up ngrok tool in your system. In this article, I will show you a simple method using which you can enable port forwarding without a router using ngrok tool. So let’s get started.

Introduction

ngrok is an open-source utility for exposing localhost ports to the Internet. It works by tunneling TCP/IP traffic over an encrypted HTTPS connection through its own encrypted proxy server. You can use it to securely expose any port number on your computer to the outside world without needing root privileges. ngrok allows you to expose a web server running on your local machine to the internet. Just tell ngrok what port your web server is listening on.

Configure ngrok 

After installing ngrok, navigate to the directory containing the ngrok binary. Open the configuration file at config.json in your preferred text editor. Edit the following settings:

• `http_port` – The port number you want to expose.
• `https_port` – The secure port number you want to use.
• `external_interface` – The IP address you want to bind to.
• `internal_ipv4` – The IPv4 address you want to bind ngrok to.
• `external` – Whether you want to allow external connections. If set to true, ngrok listens on all interfaces. If false, only listen on the specified interface.
• `auth_token` – An optional authentication token. If not provided, ngrok uses the default auth token.

Installing your Authtoken

$ ngrok authtoken <YOUR AUTHTOKEN>

Password protecting your tunnel

$ ngrok http -auth="username:password" 80