Recently while working on a messenger bot project I required an HTTPS server (Facebook requires the endpoint to run over https). But enabling encrypted HTTPS on an AWS web server is a time-consuming task.

Ngrok to the rescue!

Ngrok is a tool that helps you set up secure tunnels to localhost. Ngrok gives web accessible URLs and tunnels all traffic from that URL to our localhost! Easy, peasy!

Getting HTTPS on AWS

Download the ngrok tool by running the below command on your server:

wget https://bin.equinox.io/c/4VmDzA7iaHb/ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip
unzip ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip

Now we need to run the ngrok tool in the background. Use the below command to run in background:

./ngrok http 8000 > /dev/null &

Awesome! Now we have HTTPS tunneling to our localhost port 8000. But what is the URL?

To get the urls type curl into your localhost port 4040.

curl  http://localhost:4040/api/tunnels

You can find the HTTP and HTTPS links in the output.

Enjoy your HTTPS tunnel.