Have you ever been developing an application locally and needed to share it with someone? Maybe you’ve gotten stuck on a usability question or a design issue. Wouldn’t it be nice to give someone a URL that points to your local domain?
Sharing your local environment can be done, but it has never been super simple. I always end up spending way to much time searching for ways of doing it when it would be faster just to set up a small cloud server and push it up.
All that has changed with several new services on the market. The first one I tried was Finch a service currently in beta, and I was blown with how easy it was to use.
Here is how simple it is to setup and create a publicly sharable URL:
npm install --global finch
After that run the finch register command to create a new account:
finch register
This command will ask for an email and password and after it finishes you’ll get an email to validate your account. Then you can run:
finch forward http://site.dev:8000
Replace our “site.dev:8000” with your local domain. This command will then output a public URL that you can share with the world.
The following sites are now being forwarded. Press CTRL+C at any time to end your session: ----------------------------------------------------------- | Public URL | Private URL | ----------------------------------------------------------- | https://fog-vast.usefinch.com | http://site.dev:8000 | -----------------------------------------------------------
Here is an example of it loaded in the browser:
I had all this setup in under 10 minutes.
Right now, the service is still in beta, and only a free plan is available, but paid packages will be coming out. The free plan offers 10 hours a month of use and for my use case that would be sufficient.
If you ever need to share from Homestead or anything local check it out. I was impressed.
Other Services
Here are a few other services that might be suitable for you:
From all the ones I tried Finch was the simplest and worked straight away.
