Passageway – Expose Localhost to Public

                   When we are working on REST APIs there are situations where you may require to expose the APIs to the public or If you are working with any social source integration where we need to configure callback URLs, we require to host our APIs onto the public IP address. Getting the public IP from the network department is a tedious process(Requires tickets, approvals, and follow-ups). Here is a tool called “Passageway” (from Runscope) which will allow us to expose the localhost to the public. Follow the below steps to setup Passageway.

Step1: Create an account with https://www.runscope.com/signup

Step2: Login to “Runscope” and create a bucket.

Step 3: Download the “Passageway” from here. The “Passageway” agents are available for different operating systems.

Step 4: Open the command prompt and run the “Passageway” agent as shown below.

Step 5: Then, it will prompt to select the “bucket” which we created in Step2 and the port number for which the “Passageway” will route the requests on to our localhost. After providing the details, “Passageway” will provide us the forward URL which will be accessible from the public.

          We are done. Now, we can expose the APIs running on the localhost to the public. Use the base URL provided by “Passageway” and append your URI to that. When we make a request to “Passageway”, the request will be forwarded to localhost on the registered port(Port is provided in Step5) through “Passageway”.

About Siva Prasad Rao Janapati

Siva Janapati is an Architect with experience in building Cloud Native Microservices architectures, Reactive Systems, Large scale distributed systems, and Serverless Systems. Siva has hands-on in architecture, design, and implementation of scalable systems using Cloud, Java, Go lang, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Spring, Spring Boot, Lightbend reactive tech stack, APIGEE edge & on-premise and other open-source, proprietary technologies. Expertise working with and building RESTful, GraphQL APIs. He has successfully delivered multiple applications in retail, telco, and financial services domains. He manages the GitHub(https://github.com/2013techsmarts) where he put the source code of his work related to his blog posts.