Facebook webhooks won't accept Ngrok and Localtunnel anymore

If you want to test webhooks locally you probably use Ngrok or Localtunnel. I do.

Recently I wanted to play with Instagram webhooks and I couldn’t because surprisingly Facebook do not accept Ngrok and Localtunnel URLs anymore and marks them as malicious and/or abusive.

I don’t really understand why Facebook blocked the only known solutions of local webhooks testing.

Fortunately I have a server and a domain name.

Solution

What we’ll need:

• Nginx
• LetsEncrypt cert (because Facebook wants HTTPS URL)

As soon as you configured your Nginx and it can accept traffic on port 443 add location section like this (pay attention to all the slashes. They are important):

location /proxy/ {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/;
}

This will grab all the traffic to you-domain/proxy/, decrypt it and proxy it to port 3000.

Now, on you local machine, run:

ssh -R 3000:0.0.0.0:3000 -N user@server

Change ports as needed. The very first 3000 is remote port to redirect traffic from. The 0.0.0.0:3000 part is your local server listening on port 3000 as well.

You local server will get URLs without that /proxy part. So your-domain/proxy/webhooks will be transformed to 0.0.0.0:3000/webhooks

Now the traffic goes like this:

Origin(https) -> your-domain(https) -> your-server:3000(http) -> your-local-machine:3000(http)