Sharing in progress work

Sharing local in-progress work

When working with a distributed team, it can be difficult to share in-progress work with colleagues in different locations—for example, a new feature or change that you don't yet want to commit to a PR. If a screenshot or screen recording won't suffice, and full in-browser interactivity is needed, we can use ngrok. ngrok works as a tunnel, allowing your local machine to be accessible to devices outside your internal network.

Detailed instructions are provided on the ngrok download page, but a quick overview is below:

Steps

1. Download ngrok, and sign up for a free account on the site.
2. Unzip the download and move the application to the root of your projects folder.
3. Generate an auth token by visiting your ngrok dashboard, and copy the text provided for your terminal. It should be in the form of ./ngrok authtoken <YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN>.
4. In a new terminal window, start Sage as usual using npm start.
5. Open a new window or tab in your terminal, and navigate to the folder where you moved the ngrok application. Paste or type in the line you copied from your ngrok dashboard to authenticate and connect your account.
6. Start ngrok by running ./ngrok http 3000. This proxies port 3000 for Sage (port 4000 is used with browsersync, and not needed for sharing).
7. Once ngrok starts, note the Forwarding addresses provided (one for http, one for https). This is the URL that you can share.