Testing Acquia Lift & Content Hub locally with ngrok

Testing integrations with external systems can sometimes prove tricky. Services like Acquia Lift & Content Hub need to make connections back to your server in order to pull content. Testing this requires that your environment be publicly accessible, which often precludes testing on your local development environment.

Enter ngrok

As mentioned in Acquia’s documentation, ngrok can be used to facilitate local development with Content Hub. Once you install ngrok on your development environment, you’ll be able to use the ngrok client to connect and create an instant, secure URL to your local development environment that will allow traffic to connect from the public internet. This can be used for integrations such as Content Hub for testing, or even for allowing someone remote to view in-progress work on your local environment from anywhere in the world without the need for a screen share. You can also send this URL to mobile devices like your phone or tablet and test your local development work easily on other devices.

After starting the client, you’ll be provided the public URL you can plug into your integration for testing. You’ll also see a console where you can observe incoming connections.

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