Introduction
In a typical development environment and release pipeline, development is done on a local machine and the local Odoo instance is called via http://localhost:8069.
However, in some cases it is necessary that external services can call your local environment for testing purposes. Here are some examples:
Odoo interacts with a shipping API that pushes delivery-updates to your database
Integration of a new Payment Provider that notifies Odoo whenever a transaction was successful or failed.
To test these scenarios, the external service must be able to connect to your local Odoo database via Webhooks.
One simple way to do so, is to use ngrok (Link: ngrok.com), a command-line tool that maps your local ports to a public address without any changes necessary to your local firewall.
In the following post, we will explain how to use ngrok with Odoo on a Windows machine.
Setup
Head to the ngrok page and sign-up with their system
Download the latest ngrok version (Link), extract the .exe-File within the Zip-Package and place it at any location on your computer
Open a command-line window, head to the location of your ngrok.exe-File
Register ngrok with your account by typing
ngrok authtoken abcd(replace abcd with your authtoken which you will receive after sign-up)
Start ngrok-forwarding to Odoo by typing
ngrok http localhost:8069
Ngrok will display the current status:
Start your local Odoo-instance.
Now you will be able to access Odoo from external services (or even your webbrowser) through the *.ngrok.io-link provided within the command-line-window).