ngrok

This guide walks through how to get ngrok up and running on your machine. To test it out with Telnyx webhooks, you'll need to sign up. If you'd like to test out your ngrok instance by receiving a webhook associated with an API-enabled phone call, jump to our Receiving Webhooks in Voice API after you complete these steps!

ngrok is a popular tunneling tool used to expose a locally running application to the internet. You can download it for free with all of the functionality you need here. This is useful for receiving webhooks to your local applications for testing.

For the sake of this tutorial, we'll assume that your local application is running locally on port 5000. Now you’ll need the ability to send a request to that port from Telnyx. You can easily do this using ngrok when developing your application.

Sign up for ngrok and follow the setup and installation steps to get up and running. The final step in the process is to start an HTTP tunnel to your application. The instructions specify $ ./ngrok http 80, which will tunnel traffic to port 80 on your machine. As our application is running on port 5000, you should use that instead: $ ./ngrok http 5000.

When you run this command, you should see output similar to the following:

ngrok by @inconshreveable

Session Status                online
Account                       Little Bobby Tables (Plan: Free)
Version                       2.3.28
Region                        United States (us)
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    http://ead8b6b4.ngrok.io -> localhost:5000
Forwarding                    https://ead8b6b4.ngrok.io -> localhost:5000

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1.   rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Note

After pasting the above content, Kindly check and remove any new line added

The forwarding addresses will be different for you, but they should still point to localhost:5000. Copy the https forwarding address, as you'll need it to configure your Mission Control Portal.

For messaging, webhooks set the webhook URL on your messaging profile from the Telnyx Portal Messaging dashboard. Edit your Messaging Profile by clicking the “Basic Options” button [✎]. Select the “Inbound” section and paste the forwarding address from ngrok into the Webhook URL field. Append /webhooks to the end of the URL to direct the request to the webhook endpoint in your local application.

For now, you'll leave “Failover URL” blank, but if you wanted to have Telnyx resend the webhook — if sending to the Webhook URL fails — you can specify an alternate address in this field.

We hope this guide helped you understand how to use ngrok. Next, why not dive into our API and start sending text messages and making API enabled phone calls? Create an account and enjoy Telnyx APIs!