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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.

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 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.

The instructions below assume that you are running a Reboot development instance on port 9991, and that you are running a local development web server for the frontend on port 3000.

ngrok​

Before you begin:

  1. Make sure you are signed up on ngrok.com.
  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 outside of your repo.

To begin, create an additional ngrok.yml configuration file inside your repo:

# Note that this configuration file, which gets checked into your repo,
# does NOT contain your secret ngrok auth token!
version: 2
tunnels:
  frontend:
    addr: 3000
    proto: http
  backend:
    addr: 9991
    proto: http

Then, from your repo, run the following:

ngrok start --config ./ngrok.yml,/PATH/TO/YOUR/SECRET/ngrok.yml --all

Note that this uses two config files: the first is the one for your project, the second config is the default ngrok config file you created during ngrok setup, and which contains your secret auth token.

ngrok will now show two public URLs: one for your frontend, and one for your backend.

info

If you are not a paying customer of ngrok, you must now visit each of the URLs in your web browser to accept traffic being sent to them. You must do this for both URLs, else your app won't work!

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

Changing the backend URL in the frontend​

No matter what tunnel service you've chosen, it will have given you a new hostname and port for your application. You will use this hostname and port into your frontend's .env file, replacing http://localhost:9991. For example:

REACT_APP_REBOOT_URL=https://43ee-20-61-126-210.ngrok-free.app

You may need to restart your development webserver (e.g. the npm start command) before changes to the .env file take effect.

Now your frontend will access the backend via the tunnel host you've provided, making it accessible anywhere on the internet!