Development on a local machine whilst being publicly visible on the net

Just read a nice little tip in the “Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails”. If you’re working off a laptop in an office or at home and you want your app to be viewable on the public internet you don’t have to develop on a remote server. You can however use ssh to forward requests from a remote server (if you have one) over an ssh tunnel to your local machine.

Once minor addition to your /etc/ssh/sshdconfig

GatewayPorts clientspecified

and reload the config. Be very careful here, there’s nothing worse than changing your config and accidentally locking yourself out of your remote machine.

root@li38-149:~# /etc/init.d/ssh reload
 * Reloading OpenBSD Secure Shell server's configuration sshd

Now trying the following from your local command line.

rl@bloodandguts:~/project$ ssh user@yourserver.com -R :9000:127.0.0.1:9000 sleep 99999

Accessing http://yourserver.com:9000 will now serve the application over the tunnel. Obivously your provider will need to allow the port you are trying to access available. Some ports are locked down by firewalls and so a little extra running around may be required.