I was trying to create a Slack app. In order to let Slack send REST requests to my dev environment, eg. http://localhost:9000, I searched a bit and saw ngrok. Ngrok is very handy for this kind of setup:

Slack -> xyz.ngrok.io -> localhost

However I just don’t want to install anything so I turned to Google and to my surprise SSH can exactly do this(for who knows how many years). I know I can forward a local port to a remote host to connect to a service behind firewall such as databases, this is my first attempt to forward a remote port to local so Slack API can contact my localhost.

Here’s a better article which explained how to do port forwarding in both directions with SSH.

In short, to forward a remote port to my localhost, I need to

1, update the sshd_config on remote host and have GatewayPorts enabled and then restart SSH service

GatewayPorts yes

2, in a local terminal, run the following command replacing my.remote.host with your server’s domain or IP.

ssh -nNT -R 9800:localhost:9000 my.remote.host

Then test it with

curl -i http://my.remote.host:9800

The request should be forwarded to your localhost:9000.

🙂