Top all-time · #458
ngrok
Company blog · ngrok.com/blogsystemsweb
ngrok is the company blog at ngrok.com, writing about systems and web. Since 2013, 127 different Hacker News readers have linked it 173 times, most often “Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 0 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Commenters mostly name ngrok as a tunnelling tool that exposes local servers to the internet, not as writing. The site also hosts job listings and webhook best-practice guidance (webhooks.fyi).
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
ngrok is developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to your apps, APIs, and AI models, wherever they run. Start on localhost, ship to prod.
Most-linked posts?
- Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost48 people · 50 mentions · first linked 2013-07-16
- Ngrok – Expose any local server behind a NAT or firewall to the Internet21 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2013-06-26
- Prompt caching for cheaper LLM tokens5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-12-16
- I ported Kubernetes to the browser4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-06-30
- Lessons learned from running ngrok on ngrok3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-08-07
- /product3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-06
- Lessons from my overly-introspective, self-improving coding agent3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-26
- Introspected tunnels to localhost3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-12-17
- Expanding ngrok's free plan with security in one line2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-25
- A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-24
What Hacker News says?
You could just use ngrok for this https://ngrok.com/
Comment linking /
on “Guacamole – A clientless remote desktop gateway”Submitted Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost as a story · 468 points
HN discussionngrok | San Francisco & Seattle | ONSITE | Full-time | https://ngrok.com/ I'm the Director of Engineering here at ngrok. Ngrok builds developer tools and infrastructure to bring secure, powerful network tunnels to individual developers and companies alike. Ngrok's tools enable our customers to easily share local development environments, securely access remote devices, build and test webhook integrations, and much m…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted Prompt caching for cheaper LLM tokens as a story · 299 points
HN discussionNot sure if you've heard of NGrok, but this tunnels your server and can be accessed outside of your network with or without https. https://ngrok.com/
Comment linking /
on “Camera and microphone require HTTPS in Firefox 68”Submitted Ngrok – Expose any local server behind a NAT or firewall to the Internet as a story · 180 points
HN discussionThe thing I really love about ngrok, though, is the web dashboard where you can inspect your tunnelled traffic and even replay requests: https://ngrok.com/docs#inspect
Comment linking /docs
on “Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?”Submitted How we built ngrok's data platform as a story · 164 points
HN discussionNgrok - https://ngrok.com So easy and super convienient if you quickly need your local server accessible from somewhere else.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?”Submitted Ngrok 3.0 as a story · 106 points
HN discussionKeePass ( https://keepass.info/ ) with something like Nextcloud ( https://nextcloud.com/ ) or any other solution for syncing password databases across devices. Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS certificates are free, as is Apache/Nginx/Caddy to reverse proxy Nextcloud or any other solution (if a web based interface is needed). You might also need something like ngrok ( https://ngrok.com/ ) for publically accessing the instance…
Comment linking /
on “1Password 8 will be subscription only and won’t support local vaults”Submitted Show HN: ngrok – secure introspectable tunnels to localhost as a story · 66 points
HN discussionhttps://ngrok.com/product It's SSH forwarding as a service. Not super-simple, but not too hard either I think.
Comment linking /product
on “Ask HN: What is an example of a super simple SaaS that is profitable?”Submitted Quantization from the Ground Up as a story · 17 points
HN discussionngrok | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time | ONSITE or REMOTE | https://ngrok.com ngrok is looking for senior backend distributed systems engineers! Your favorite developer tool is built by a very small company, so there's plenty opportunity to wear multiple hats and a lot of automony shaping the entire product. ngrok has many difficult challenges in distributed systems and networking that you won't find elsewhere in a c…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)”Submitted I ported Kubernetes to the browser as a story · 14 points
HN discussionngrok | San Francisco, CA | Full Time | Remote OK | US Only | https://ngrok.com ngrok is looking for networking and distributed systems engineers. ngrok has a rare combination of a small team with very deep technical challenges and a product that has massive adoption among software developers all around the world. Do you like . . . - Hard technical problems in distributed systems / network engineering? - Small compa…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2019)”Submitted Ngrok-rs – safe and portable network ingress to your Rust apps as a story · 12 points
HN discussionQ, K and V are a way of filtering the relevant aspects for the task at hand from the token embeddings. "he was red" - maybe color, maybe angry, the "red" token embedding carries both, but only one aspect is relevant for some particular prompt. https://ngrok.com/blog/prompt-caching/
Comment linking /blog/prompt-caching/
on “The Illustrated Transformer”Submitted Lessons learned from running ngrok on ngrok as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYou're probably talking about this site? https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-men... It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/ .
Comment linking /
on “Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022”Submitted Ngrok is also now your Kubernetes ingress as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIt's absolutely possible. Admittedly I'm still running 2.1.18, but I just tested it there and it still works. https://ngrok.com/docs#subdomain edit: Just in case, I updated to 2.2.4 (newest) and it's still possible to use custom subdomains.
Comment linking /docs
on “Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost”Submitted Ngrok's Always-On Global Server Load Balancing as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThanks for creating ngrok. Sharing my experience and use case: I tried ngrok (and localtunnel) two months ago to show a localhost WordPress site. Both failed because WordPress uses absolute links to reference css, js and img assets. So the site was visible under whatever.ngrok.com but the assets where still linked to localhost. I read the FAQ at https://ngrok.com/faq#wordpress and tried all the mentioned plugins plu…
Comment linking /faq
on “Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost”Submitted I Ported Kubernetes to the Browser as a story · 6 points
HN discussionngrok has connection limits, but not request limits. Perhaps your server wasn't using keep-alive connections? It's mentioned in the pricing FAQ (scroll down a bit from this link): https://ngrok.com/product#pricing
Comment linking /product
on “Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost”Submitted What the heck is the Public Suffix List? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'not currently using it (so I did not test this) but seems like you have the option of custom TCP as I can see here https://ngrok.com/product#pricing for Pro account.
Comment linking /product
on “Ngrok: Secure tunnels to localhost”Submitted Don't use us-east-1, or 'Why didn't ngrok go down in last week's AWS outage?' as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
