NGROK - tunneling practice for LUIS or Microsoft Cognitive Services on Microsoft Bot Framework solution

ngrok exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

You download and run a program on your machine and provide it the port of a network service, usually a web server.

It connects to the ngrok cloud service which accepts traffic on a public address and relays that traffic through to the ngrok process running on your machine and then on to the local address you specified.


It is great to be used for LUIS integration under Microsoft Bot framework emulator for robust communication.

Download file from 

https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator/wiki/Tunneling-(ngrok) 

or  

follow the link of my local copy ngrok.exe : 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pjMhTpf7PC3fkLNXpajM59pbBlG2aFJm/view?usp=sharing  

then configure the path in emulator as seen below;

a.      Download the ngrok executable from https://ngrok.com/ to the local machine where emulator runs. Site contains step by step instruction.
You need to create an account for free

b.      Configure the path to ngrok in the emulator's App Settings dialog (Windows> search > type Bot Framework Emulator (V4))

c. Verify the emulator is able to successfully launch ngrok

If you've followed these steps but the emulator is not able to launch ngrok, ensure you have ngrok version 2.1.18 or later. 

Earlier versions have been known to be incompatible.

To check ngrok's version, from the command line:

ngrok -v