localtunnel.me with docker-compose

For local development, you find yourself having to deal with webhooks, authorization callbacks etc, anything that requires public facing IP or sometimes a public domain. You can use ngrok or localtunnel.

For this quick writeup, I’m going to show you how I manage to include localtunnel.me in my docker-compose.yml so that it loads everytime I run my docker-compose.

First I create a folder inside my project called lt, you can name it whatever you want but make sure to take note of the folder name because you are going to need that in your docker-compose.yml file. Inside that folder I drop in a Dockerfile with the following contents.

Then in my docker-compose.yml file I’ve added the following contents.

You will notice that I pass the --local-host web in the lt options, this will ensure that you are forwarding the requests to the web service in your docker-compose.yml. You can also pass --subdomain yoursubdomain if you want to keep it consistent, but take note that it may not be available.

To get the url you can just run: docker-compose logs -f lt and this will give you something like https://<random_subdomain>.localtunnel.me which you can use for your webhooks, callbacks, etc.