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Exposing Services Publicly

Sometimes you need your local service to be accessible from the outside world — for testing webhooks, collaborating on demos, or integrating with external systems. Inspectr makes this easy with Expose Mode, providing a lightweight, secure local tunnel similar to tools like ngrok or localtunnel, but integrated directly with your API inspection flow.

What Is Inspectr Ingress?

Section titled “What Is Inspectr Ingress?”

Inspectr Ingress is a secure tunneling relay, exposing your local API service through Inspectr proxy to the public internet via a temporary subdomain on in-spectr.dev.

Example:

https://my-api.in-spectr.dev → http://localhost:8080

This works just like creating an HTTP tunnel, where Inspectr safely forwards external requests to your local machine; without manual port forwarding or complex setup.

Use Cases

Section titled “Use Cases”
  • Testing third-party webhooks (Stripe, GitHub, Zapier…)
  • Sharing live demos without deployment
  • Allowing remote teammates to test your local service
  • Connecting an LLM (ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude) to a local MCP Server
  • Forwarding traffic to local AI models (e.g. Ollama)
  • Acting as a secure tunnel for developers working with local APIs
Looking for capturing real Webhook events? Have a look at Webhook Debugging

Step 1: Run Inspectr with --expose

Section titled “Step 1: Run Inspectr with --expose”
Terminal window
inspectr --backend=http://localhost:3000 --expose --channel=my-api --channel-code=secret123
  • --channel sets your subdomain (e.g., my-api.in-spectr.dev)
  • The channel is optional. If not set, a random channel is assigned
  • The terminal will display the public URL after launch

Step 2: Send Remote Requests

Section titled “Step 2: Send Remote Requests”

Use the public URL to test integrations, receive webhooks, or collaborate:

Terminal window
curl https://my-api.in-spectr.dev/api/hello
  • Requests are forwarded to your local backend
  • All traffic is logged in the terminal and UI
  • Works seamlessly with webhooks, HTTP clients, or external services

Public URL’s Lifetime

Section titled “Public URL’s Lifetime”
  • The public URL exists only while your Inspectr session is active
  • Once Inspectr stops, the public subdomain is released
  • No data is persisted on Inspectr ingress; it only forwards the traffic.
  • You can use channels with a channel code to temporary reserve your public URL’s.