1. LocalTunnel

LocalTunnel is a free and open-source tunneling solution that allows you to expose your local development server to the internet. It provides a simple command-line interface and supports custom subdomains, making it easy to share your work with others.

How to setup LocalTunnel

# 1. Install LocalTunnel globally
npm install -g localtunnel

# 2. Run LocalTunnel on specific port
lt --port 3000  # Generates a random subdomain for port 3000

# 3. Open tunnel url and insert password as per instructions

# 4. Confirm tunnel works by visiting `/api/health` endpoint

If you're using Vite, You may want to add the tunnel url to allowedHosts in your Vite configuration:

$development: {
  vite: {
    server: {
      allowedHosts: ['nuxtstart.loca.lt'],
    },
  },
},

Most of the time, You want fix tunnel url so that you can whitelist it in third party services like Polar for webhooks. You can do that by using --subdomain flag:

# Exposes your app at myapp.loca.lt
lt --port 3000 --subdomain myapp

However, LocalTunnel may have some reliability issues and occasional downtime, so to ensure it's always up and running, you can use a process manager like PM2 to automatically restart the tunnel if it goes down or use a simple bash script to keep it alive.

# Run tunnel and restart if it goes down
while true; do lt --port 3010 --subdomain nuxtstart; sleep 1; done

2. TBD

3. TBD