Why It Matters
Salesforce sends outbound messages, platform event callbacks, and webhook notifications to external endpoints — but during development, your endpoint lives on localhost. ngrok creates a secure tunnel from a public URL to your local machine, so you can test integrations end-to-end without deploying anything.
Spin up ngrok http 3000, paste the URL into your Salesforce outbound message config, and watch the payloads arrive locally. Invaluable for architects prototyping integration patterns before committing to infrastructure.
Alternatives
- Beeceptor — mock API endpoints without any local server
- Webhook.site — inspect incoming webhooks in real-time
- LocalTunnel — open-source alternative to ngrok