How to install ngrok in Windows 10 and Windows 11?

ngrok simply makes your locally-hosted web server appear to be hosted on a sub domain of ngrok.com and mapped with ngrok.io, meaning that no public IP or domain name on the local machine is needed.

The ngrok client software is available for Windows, Linux and macOS and the basic ngrok service is free and permits up to four tunnels and 40 connections per minute.

Download ngrok in Windows

To start, open ngrok.com in your browser and click on Download for Windows and unzip the file after downloading.

We now need to set up the environment variables for ngrok .Note - Environment variables help programs know what directory to install files in, where to store temporary files, and where to find user profile settings

Search for 'Environment variable' in the windows search option and select 'Edit the Environment Variables'.

After successfully doing so click on the Environment Variables and look for Path under the System Variables section and click on Edit.

Click on New and then add the path where you have stored ngrok. Make sure you close the path with \ .

The path will be C:\Users\Rony\Desktop\ngrok-v3-stable-windows-amd64\

How to get the path

Right click on the downloaded ngrok file and go to properties

What you can do now is add location and path selected above and type the string in the path field.

Lastly check if you are able to run ngrok. Open the command prompt and enter the below command,

ngrok version 

To start a HTTP tunnel forwarding to your local port 80, run this command on your command prompt

ngrok http 80

You can see two forwarding addresses? ngrok provides both an https and an http version of the URL that points to localhost. Also notice the port number 4040

The local folders can be shared directly without an HTTP server through an inbuilt ngrok file server. To share the local folder directly through ngrok , as a first step configure the authtoken to the ngrok

The authtoken can be retrieved through ngrok dashboard — the user should sign up for an account, copy the command to set the authtoken by navigating to the dashboard.

Start the ngrok

Now in order to share something, give the path of the folder

ngrok http “file:///C:\Rony\web_root\myWebsite

Now if you copy the forwarding address in the browser the data will be accessible to everyone having the address.

https://9ec1-2405-201-9009-f1ab-dc-996b-8e67-7597.in.ngrok.io -> file:///C:/web_root/

The traffic can be monitored through the following URL — http://127.0.0.1:4040

ngrok is a powerful tool to expose your local services via secure tunnels. You can use it to expose web servers, API Rest, SSH, game servers, databases, and many others for free.