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Non-local development

Reboot provides an excellent local development experience, allowing you to develop apps on your machine that seamlessly transfer to production. For some applications, however, purely local development is not sufficient. You may for example want to try your Reboot application on your phone, or you may want to test it with somebody who is not sitting at your computer.

Since Reboot uses SSL connections, even during development, you cannot simply connect to your development machine from other computers by typing in a different hostname or IP. The sections below provide options for how to do such non-local development instead.

Using the hosts file​

When running Reboot for local development, the SSL certificate it uses is for the dev.localhost.direct hostname. That hostname normally resolves to the IP address 127.0.0.1. If you would like to access your Reboot app from a different computer on the same network as your development machine, you may change the IP address that dev.localhost.direct resolves to by changing the hosts file (e.g. /etc/hosts on Linux and MacOS) on your other computer:

# For example, if your development machine is at 192.168.0.13:
192.168.0.13 dev.localhost.direct

Your other computer can now access the Reboot development instance as if it were on the same machine.

Deploying to a dedicated testing environment​

You may deploy your Reboot application to a testing environment. This works just like deploying to production, but the deployment is kept private (typically by using a different domain name).

This approach gives you a production-like environment to test with, but does not support convenient features like live-updating of your application.

Tunnels​

You can use a third-party "development tunnel", like bore or ngrok, to give your normal local development environment an internet-public URL. How to configure these tunnels is dependent on the tunnel service you choose.

All of the instructions below assume that you are running a Reboot development instance on port 9991.

bore​

bore is an open-source TCP forwarder, with a free public service hosted at bore.pub. No registration is required.

To forward your local Reboot development instance running on port 9991, run the following:

docker run -it --init --rm --network host ekzhang/bore local 9991 --to bore.pub

This will print a new hostname and port, for example:

INFO bore_cli::client: listening at bore.pub:36963

In this example, your new hostname is bore.pub and your new port is 36963.

Next, bypass the SSL certificate warning on each of your browsers.

You may now update your frontend to use the tunnel, allowing you to access your application from anywhere.

ngrok​

It is possible to use ngrok with Reboot, with a little setup.

Before you begin:

  1. Make sure you are signed up on ngrok.com, and that you have verified your identity via a credit card. You do not need to pay for ngrok to use it with Reboot, but you must use a verified account.
  2. Install the ngrok CLI on the machine that runs rbt dev run. Follow the instructions on ngrok.com to store your credentials in an ngrok.yml file.

To forward your local Reboot development instance running on port 9991, run the following:

ngrok tcp dev.localhost.direct:9991

This will print a tcp://... URL, for example:

Forwarding   tcp://0.tcp.eu.ngrok.io:12345 -> dev.localhost.direct:9991
info

Since Reboot uses both gRPC and HTTP websocket connections, we must use ngrok tcp instead of ngrok http.

In this example, your new hostname is 0.tcp.eu.ngrok.io and your new port is 12345.

Next, bypass the SSL certificate warning on each of your browsers.

You may now update your frontend to use the tunnel, allowing you to access your application from anywhere.

Bypassing SSL certificate warnings​

Because our local development environment is using SSL certificates for dev.localhost.direct, but the URLs we use while tunneling use different hostnames, we must get our web browser to accept an SSL certificate mismatch. To do so:

  • Go to https://YOUR_TUNNEL_HOSTNAME:YOUR_TUNNEL_PORT/__/inspect
  • When your browser tells you about the certificate mismatch, tell it to disregard it.
    • On Chrome, click Advanced, then Proceed to ... (unsafe).
  • You will now see your inspect page, asking you to Enter Admin Token. This means the connection is working! If you'd like to use the inspect page: during development, any admin token is accepted.
  • You must repeat these steps once for every browser you will use with the application.

Changing the backend URL in the frontend​

The tunnel service you've chosen will have given you a new hostname and port for your application. If you haven't already, you should first bypass the SSL certificate warnings your browser raises for these.

You may then use this hostname and port into your frontend's .env file, replacing dev.localhost.direct:9991. For example:

REACT_APP_REBOOT_ENDPOINT=https://bore.pub:36963

You may now serve your frontend as normal (or, if desired, via its own tunnel). It will access the backend via the tunnel host you've provided, making it accessible anywhere on the internet!