Homestead & Ngrok

You need to make sure Homestead (nginx) listen on that ngrok domain.

Go to your Homestead vm and as root (or sudo), copy the vhost file in /etc/nginx/sites-available and name it mydomain.ngrok.io (or add an alias to the existing vhost)

Go to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled and symlink the new vhost file using ln -s

Reload nginx.

I find it easiest to run ngrok outside homestead and just pointed at the homestead IP, and with a host-header for whichever homestead project I'm working with so for example;

ngrok 192.168.10.10:80 -host-header=myapp.dev

Hey Knox,

Thanks for this, managed to get it working a 'slightly' different way.

ngrok http -host-header=rewrite site.dev:80

ngrok 192.168.10.10:80 -host-header=myapp.dev

didn't work. ERROR: Unrecognized command: 192.168.10.10:80

but "ngrok http -host-header=rewrite site.dev:80" worked perfectly!

thanks

As of Homestead 5.x you can use the share homestead.app command to fire off ngrok to listen for homestead.app

@elasticsteve

I think this is the correct command (was missing the "http")

ngrok http 192.168.10.10:80 -host-header=site.dev

@svpernova09 That is amazing! Thanks

Maybe i'm missing something, but when i share a site in homestead, it works fine but just for the very first page. All other links in the site still points to the local url configured in the Homestead.yaml file. For example the Login or Register Forms in Laravel Auth. It still works on my machine though, but for other people that want to access the whole site, it doesn't work of course.

Do i need to configure a specific nginx vhost for a ngrok domain and start ngrok with that -host-header option?

I was having the same issue as rephluX. I got it to work by setting a new site in Homestead.yaml with a corresponding ngrok domain (pointing to the same folder).

In Homestead.yaml:

- map: yoursite.dev
  to: /home/vagrant/code/yoursite/public
- map: yoursite.ngrok.io
  to: /home/vagrant/code/yoursite/public

Then start ngrok like this:

ngrok http --subdomain=yoursite --host-header=yoursite.ngrok.io yoursite.dev:80

Notes:

You need a ngrok account to set a subdomain.

The ngrok pricing page says that you need a paid plan to use custom subdomains. I'm able to set a subdomain with the free plan, so not sure what is the situation here.

If you can't set a subdomain, I guess you have to start the ngrok tunnel first and then provision a site with the given url (having to do this every time you start ngrok).

rephluX, I'm not sure about safety, but you can add few lines to RouteServiceProvider.php

    public function boot()
    {
        // ngrok.io Hack
        $scheme = "";
        $host = "";
        $baseInfo = parse_url(config("app.url"));
        $baseHost = $baseInfo["host"];
        $baseScheme = $baseInfo["scheme"];

        if (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_HOST"])) {
            $scheme = isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"]) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO"] : $baseScheme;
            $host = isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_HOST"]) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_HOST"] : "";
        } elseif (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"])) {
            $info = parse_url($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]);
            $host = $info["host"];
            $scheme = $info["scheme"];
        }

        if ($host != "" && $host != $baseHost && preg_match("#ngrok\.io#", $host)) {
            $scheme ?: $baseScheme;
            \URL::forceRootUrl("{$scheme}://{$host}");
        }
        // End ngrok.io Hack

        parent::boot();
    }

That's it.

@KNOX - thanks it really helped me .

For Laravel >= 5.8 I use a package by Jairo Correa: https://github.com/jn-jairo/laravel-ngrok

Install with:

composer require --dev jn-jairo/laravel-ngrok

Then simply run with:

php artisan ngrok --port=8000

This was super helpful.

For some reason I couldn't get past the login with the homestead "share" command (kept getting a 409 and it was redirecting me to the original domain).