Updating ngrok-generated URL in add-on descriptor automatically

[gabor...@midori-global.com]

Hi,

I followed the "Developing locally" guide here: https://developer.atlassian.com/static/connect/docs/latest/developing/developing-locally.html

However, updating the baseUrl in add-on descriptor every time I restart ngrok is a but tedious. I am wondering how you deal with this problem.

I know paid ngrok has a feature called "Custom subdomains" but does anyone know a free tool or any kind of workaround?

Thank you,
Gabor

[Fernando Boucquez]

I ended up paying ngrok 60 bucks for the year license and it's worth it. Save the time of running ngork, copying the url to the descriptor and reinstalling all host instances.

I used to have a script that installs the addon using some rest calls when developing with atlas-sdk but for some reason didn't worth in the cloud (I didn't try to hard). 

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[James Hazelwood]

Hi Gabor,

This doesn't completely solve your problem, but are you aware of the AC_LOCAL_BASE_URL environment variable you can set when running your add-on (I'm assuming you're using atlassian-connect-express)? This will at least save you the hassle of editing your atlassian-connect.json

You can set it when starting the add-on like so:

$ AC_LOCAL_BASE_URL=https://...ngrok.io node app.js

alternatively, the locally-running ngrok service provides a REST api that you could query in a script if you wanted something more automated.

Cheers,
James

[Tobias Binna]

Hi Gabor,

I know exactly what you are talking about. This bugged me for a while as well. Ngrok is really reliable and fast but paying $5/month for a custom domain is quite expensive. I ended up using https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ (source is here: https://github.com/localtunnel/localtunnel)

It's free and allows you to use your own custom subdomain. Unfortunately there is a problem that causes the connection to go down every here and there, but I think it's still worth a try. I don't mind reconnecting here and there instead of paying $60 a year.

[gabor...@midori-global.com]

Hi All,

Thank you for your responses, they are all useful.

I am using atlassian-connect-spring-boot but James' hint about using ngrok's REST API is a great idea, this will be the first approach I will try.

localtunnel is also interesting, but if neither of these work, as a last resort I will possibly end up buying an ngrok license as Fernando suggested.

Thank you; cheers,
Gabor

[Gregory Joseph]

Here’s how I do it: https://bitbucket.org/snippets/hpesojg/L64GK
The last line would need to be adapted to your use case, our you could integrate that differently with your workflow, but you get the idea.
(relies on curl and jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/), could probably be rewritten to use httpie instead)

HTH,

-g

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[gabor...@midori-global.com]

Hi,

Thanks for the sample code! I ended up with something similar.

I am using Spring Boot, using two different profiles while running my app: "development" and "production". I put "server.url=https://my-production-url.com" in application-production.properties and put a small code in my main Application class that checks if this property is set or not. If not, a small Java method is invoked that obtains the ngrok URL from its locally running REST API and sets this URL as the value of "server.url" property. As Atlassian Connect Spring Boot supports the usage of property references in atlassian-plugin.json, I can simply use this property as a placeholder.

This way I can forget manual messing with URLs: the whole thing works out of the box in local development or production mode without any code changes. In development mode, I only have to be sure ngrok is running. Maybe a shell script could ensure this as in Gregory's solution.

I hope this gives some inspiration to users of Spring Boot.

Cheers,
Gabor

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[William Henrique]

Urgh. Every here and there? It's totally unstable. From 5 requests, it will probably fail 2. I really wish they could fix this (maybe it's on their servers and not actually the GitHub code...?)