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  1. Stackups
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  5. Webpack vs ngrok

Webpack vs ngrok

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ngrok
ngrok
Stacks420
Followers457
Votes57
GitHub Stars24.4K
Forks4.3K
Webpack
Webpack
Stacks45.0K
Followers28.1K
Votes752
GitHub Stars65.7K
Forks9.2K

ngrok vs Webpack: What are the differences?

ngrok: Securely expose a local web server to the internet and capture all traffic for detailed inspection and replay. ngrok is a reverse proxy that creates a secure tunnel between from a public endpoint to a locally running web service. ngrok captures and analyzes all traffic over the tunnel for later inspection and replay; Webpack: A bundler for javascript and friends. A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

ngrok belongs to "localhost Tools" category of the tech stack, while Webpack can be primarily classified under "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners".

"Easy to use" is the primary reason why developers consider ngrok over the competitors, whereas "Most powerful bundler" was stated as the key factor in picking Webpack.

ngrok and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than ngrok with 16.5K GitHub stars and 2.87K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2208 company stacks & 1340 developers stacks; compared to ngrok, which is listed in 26 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.

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Advice on ngrok, Webpack

Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

  • Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
  • Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
  • Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.
301k views301k
Comments
Abigail
Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

224k views224k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

ngrok
ngrok
Webpack
Webpack

ngrok is a reverse proxy that creates a secure tunnel between from a public endpoint to a locally running web service. ngrok captures and analyzes all traffic over the tunnel for later inspection and replay.

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Expose any http service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a subdomain of ngrok.com;Expose any tcp service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a random port of ngrok.com;Inspect all http requests/responses that are transmitted over the tunnel;Replay any request that was transmitted over the tunnel
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.4K
GitHub Stars
65.7K
GitHub Forks
4.3K
GitHub Forks
9.2K
Stacks
420
Stacks
45.0K
Followers
457
Followers
28.1K
Votes
57
Votes
752
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 26
    Easy to use
  • 11
    Super-fast
  • 7
    Free
  • 6
    Awesome traffic analysis page
  • 5
    Reliable custom domains
Cons
  • 5
    Doesn't Support UDP
  • 1
    El tunel SSH cambia de dominio constantemente
Pros
  • 309
    Most powerful bundler
  • 182
    Built-in dev server with livereload
  • 142
    Can handle all types of assets
  • 87
    Easy configuration
  • 22
    Laravel-mix
Cons
  • 15
    Hard to configure
  • 5
    No clear direction
  • 2
    Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy)
  • 2
    Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers
  • 2
    SystemJS integration is quite lackluster
Integrations
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
GitHub
GitHub
Slack
Slack
JavaScript
JavaScript

What are some alternatives to ngrok, Webpack?

gulp

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Grunt

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Brunch

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Parcel

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

Vite

Vite

It is an opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES Module imports during dev and bundles it with Rollup for production.

Pingy CLI

Pingy CLI

Gulp and Grunt and other heavyweight build tools are great for complicated build workflows. Sometimes you want something simpler that doesn't take lots of configuration to get up and running. That's Pingy CLI.

Termius

Termius

The #1 cross-platform terminal with built-in ssh client which works as your own portable server management system in any situation.

GoTTY

GoTTY

GoTTY is a simple command line tool that turns your CLI tools into web applications.

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