Hello

I want to use the NGROK (https://ngrok.com) localhost forwarding service with DNN for testing (e.g. on actual mobile devices) and also get client feedback (without having to deploy) when a website is in the early development phase. The NGROK service behaves as it should. However, it is not practical to evaluate a DNN-based website because the page-links appear as absolute (not relative) URLs; the localhost domain-name is in the link.

For example, the home page (i.e. on localhost) is displayed correctly via NGROK on a non-development PC. Great! So far so good.  Naturally, if one were to click on the "Services" link on the navigation menu the URL should change to,
http://50cdc2b3.eu.ngrok.io/en/Services  and the page should open

But, instead what happens is that the URL shown below appears in the address field,
http://bwig.pq.v03.05.d804.local/en/Services

Which defeats the purpose since this URL only works on my development PC where the localhost IIS process is running.

NGROK is a great service, especially with a paid subscription ($60/year) where reserved subdomain names can be used such as bigelow-test1.ngrok.io.
Other CMSs use this service and so I assume it must be possible to get this working with DNN as well. Does anyone in the DNN community know the solution to this absolute-URL issue? A search & replace for all occurrences of the localhost domain in the database with '/' is perhaps one possibility, but I am convinced that there is a more elegant solution.

 Daniel

Thanks John for your feedback.
Specifying new portal aliases via DNN or adding new bindings to web.config via IIS will not work because the URLs for the menu links include the top-level domain name as if it were hard-coded. If these links could be made relative then the problem is solved. However, that is a DNN framework-level issue over which we seem to have no control.
Regards,
Daniel

I often have the need to move a given DNN instance from production to localhost and back again. For the website to work in the new environment the portal aliases must of course be changed. So yes, I have "tried it" and it always works. As for the Skin, I am using the DIXIT and Porto3 themes from Mandeeps, which are widely used and most certainly built correctly.

The question is really this: Has anyone been able to get DNN running on localhost to work with the NGROK service where all the links work correctly in a browser on a remote computer? If the answer is Yes, then that would be very encouraging news indeed.

Daniel