2. Setup Ngrok Tunnel

This API is running locally on http://localhost:5001/ in order for our platform to talk with it you need to expose your API to the internet. The easiest way to do this when running locally is to run ngrok tunnel. It's free and secure.

Install NGrok

Get account https://ngrok.com/ & follow this https://ngrok.com/docs/getting-started/ .

Start NGrok Host

After setup you now can forward your API to the public.

$ ngrok http http://localhost:5001

You then should see something like in your terminal.

ngrok                                                                   (Ctrl+C to quit)

Session Status                online
Account                       inconshreveable (Plan: Free)
Version                       3.0.0
Region                        United States (us)
Latency                       78ms
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    https://84c5df474.ngrok-free.dev -> http://localhost:5001

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Take note of your URL

You should now be able to access your API using the https://... route given to you by ngrok. In the above example you can see the url was give as https://84c5df474.ngrok-free.dev.