@greghogg5: Your local machine is isolated. Websites running on localhost exist only on your computer. The public internet cannot reach them because of firewalls and private network addressing. Ngrok creates a secure tunnel from a public URL to your local server. When you run ngrok, it provides an address like https://random-name.ngrok.io. Traffic sent to this URL is forwarded directly to your local port. Webhooks are HTTP callbacks. An external service - such as Stripe, GitHub, or Twilio - needs to send data to your server immediately after an event occurs. These services act as clients. They require a publicly accessible endpoint to "push" the data to your application. If your application lives only on localhost, these services will fail to connect. They cannot see your machine. Ngrok makes your local environment visible to these external services, allowing you to develop and test webhooks in real-time without deploying your code to a live, production server.

Greg Hogg

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Thursday 30 April 2026 16:02:08 GMT