Late last year I participated in my first hackathon, with coding legends (in my mind) Tom Mclaughlin, Dan Berger and Michael Alexander. It was insane, and I would heartily recommend the Rails Rumble for those who can’t live in the bay area but still want to hack with their peers in rails.

Tom was our top expert on the devops side of the stack. I remember watching with pure fascination as he spun up “a tunnel” with ngrok, running our app on the web from his machine. I had never heard of such a thing before, it was beautiful, and he whizzed through it like it was a breeze.

(not scary)

Because of this experience, learning how to spin up my own tunnels had been on my to-do list for quite a while. I wanted to:

Have more hands-on experience in server-side tech Expand my deployment options beyond heroku Marvel at the ability to make quick changes to toy apps on my machine and see them immediately exposed to the web.

Last weekend I attempted this.

First off, I did not care about a massively technical, scalable rails app, I just wanted to get something rocking and rolling to hook into a tunnel, so I opted for Rails Composer. This is a neat tool I heard of from Ruby Rogues that takes a few CLI queries from you and configures an app to that spec (think auth, db, basic stylesheets, testing, etc).