How to publicly share Laravel Homestead domains

Published on October 8th, 2014 by Eric L. Barnes

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.