Heroku ngrok Buildpack
This is a Heroku Buildpack
for running a auxiliary port on a process in dyno.
The auxiliary port will be proxied by ngrok, which makes it accessible from a remote machine. By default, the port is 9090, but it can be configured with the $AUX_PORT config variable.
Setup
First, create a free ngrok account. This is necessary to use TCP with their service. Then capture your API key, and set it as a config var on your Heroku app like this:
$ heroku config:set NGROK_API_TOKEN=xxxxxx
Next, add this buildpack to your app:
$ heroku buildpacks:add jkutner/ngrok
Then add your primary buildpack. For example, if you are using Java:
$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/java
Now modify your Procfile by prefixing your web process with the with_ngrok command. For example:
web: with_ngrok java $JAVA_OPTS -cp target/classes:target/dependency/* Main
Finally, commit your changes, and redeploy the app:
$ git add Procfile
$ git commit -m "Added with_ngrok"
$ git push heroku master
Usage
Once your app is running with the ngrok buildpack and the with_ngrok command, you'll see something like
this in your logs:
2015-05-19T16:06:36.530988+00:00 app[web.1]: Listening for transport dt_socket at address: 8998
...
2015-05-19T16:06:37.052977+00:00 app[web.1]: [05/19/15 16:06:37] [INFO] [client] Tunnel established at tcp://ngrok.com:39678
Then, from your local machine, you can connect to the auxiliary port using the ngrok URL in the logs. For example:
$ open http://ngrok.com:39678Customizing
You can customize the aux port like so:
$ heroku config:set AUX_PORT=5001
You can customize the execution of ngrok by setting the NGROK_OPTS config var like so:
$ heroku config:set NGROK_OPTS="-subdomain=my-custom-name"
You can also add a .ngrok to your app.