Share your local sites on the internet with site share

EasyEngine provides you a way to share your sites with anybody even if there’s no DNS entry pointing to it. This is especially useful if

  • You are Developing your sites on local machine and want to share with your coworker.
  • You want to access a site on remote server which has no DNS entry pointed at it.

Publish a site

You can publish a site using site publish command.

ee site share example.test

Checking ngrok api for tunnel details.
Success: Successfully published example.test to url: http://xxxxxx.ngrok.io
Running additional WordPress configurations.
Success: WordPress configurations updated for publish.

EasyEngine uses ngrok‘s API behind the scenes to accomplish it. It creates a tunnel from your local machine to ngrok’s server.

Image taken from ngrok’s github repo

Using paid plan of ngrok

If you already have a paid plan of ngrok, you can use it to overcome limitations applied by ngrok’s free plan that EasyEngine uses by default.

You need get auth token from your ngrok dashboard and pass it while publishing site

ee site share example.test --token=<auth_token>

Publish for more than 7 hours

Ngrok’s free tier has a limitation that a ngrok process can only run for 7 hours simultaneously. If you find your published site isn’t accessible after 7 hours, you can use --refresh flag to republish the site.

ee site share example.test --refresh

Unpublishing a site

When you want to stop sharing a site, use site publish --disable

ee site share a.test --disable

Checking ngrok api for tunnel details.
Disabling publish.
Success: Site publish disabled.
Running additional WordPress configurations.
Success: WordPress configurations updated for publish.

Limitations

There are some limitations of site publish. These are mainly because of limits applied by ngrok’s free tier. If you already have a paid plan of ngrok, you can also use it’s paid plan with EE.

  • Only one site can be published at a time.
  • Site can be published for 7 hours at a stretch.