Localhost Tunneling on Windows

You need localhost tunneling in the following scenarios.

• Sometimes you are trying to access an API on internet, but realized that your application is not hosted online.
• You do no want to open your site to public internet, but needs to access the internet from the application
• You site/web application is not yet ready for launching, and you need to test some public URL.
• Your online application is interfaced to a physical resource, but you do not want to worry with IP addresses, ports numbers, firewall, routers.
• You need to show the progress of an un-deployed application to the customer.

Two (2) candidates to be considered are, PageKite or localtunnel.

Localtunnel is written in Ruby, works well in Linux or Mac, but very very hard to setup in Windows. Its best to install using Cygin. Its is more popular, and supported by the cloud communication firm Twilio.

Pagekite is written in python and works very well, either in Windows, Linux, Mac and even Android.

PageKite WINS my vote, because of its cross-platform ease of installation. Its free for personal use, and about $5/month for commercial use