As a React Native developer, connecting a real Android or iOS device to my local server is a daily need. Sure, I could mess around with my machine’s public IP, but that’s clunky and not exactly fun. I wanted something clean and human-readable.
That’s where ngrok came in, offering quick tunnels and a slick public URL. For $10/month, I even got a fixed domain. It worked... until it didn’t. Random errors, unstable connections, and no real answers from support left me frustrated.
So I built fuck-ngrok—a simple set of nginx configs you can toss into a cloud container to reverse tunnel back into your local machine. Best part? I get unlimited domains for the dirt-cheap price of a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet (plus whatever domain I use, which gives me endless subdomains too).
Goodbye ngrok. Hello freedom.
Follow this guide from digital ocean
In the linked guide above, the only things that need to be changed is regarding disabling root login and changing the specified username (the guide also tells you to do this) In the user setup script, change the line
sed --in-place 's/^PermitRootLogin.*/PermitRootLogin prohibit-password/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
To
sed --in-place 's/^PermitRootLogin.*/PermitRootLogin no/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
When creating your firewall, ensure HTTPS port 443 and HTTP port 80 (if using http) are enabled in the inbound rules.
Run the below commands to update apt packages and install NGINX
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx
Then in the location /etc/nginx/sites-enabled create 2 new files called server.conf and supabase.conf.
Open server.conf using nano with the command
sudo nano server.conf
Then paste the contents of server.nginx.conf from this repo replacing the SERVER_ZOPLO_DOMAIN with the domain provided for the server.
Repeat the above step for supabase.conf and paste in the contents of supabase.nginx.conf replacing SUPABASE_ZOPLO_DOMAIN with the domain provided for the supabase webhooks.
Run the following command to install certbot
sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
Run the following command replacing DOMAIN with the server domain provided.
sudo certbot --nginx -d DOMAIN
Repeat the same command for the supabase webhook domain
Ensure the command output mentions the correct file that it has edited. This should be server.conf or supabase.conf
Run the following command to restart NGINX and apply our changes
sudo service nginx restart
Ensure the SSH key you have added is linked to your .ssh/config file with the corresponding ip/domain.
Then run the command replacing LOCAL_SERVER_PORT with the local server port (usually 8080), LOCAL_WEBHOOK_PORT with the supabase emulator webhook port (usually 54321), USERNAME with the username created during the droplet creation and DOMAIN_OR_IP with the domain or ip of the droplet.
ssh -R 3333:localhost:LOCAL_SERVER_PORT -R 3334:localhost:LOCAL_WEBHOOK_PORT USERNAME@DOMAIN_OR_IP
You should now have a linux container running that will act as a reverse tunnel to direct traffic from the relevant web ports to your localhost meaning it can be connected to using physical devices on production or dev.