Testing add-on without ngrok

Atlassian team wrote a good tutorial Getting started. This uses ngrok to tunnel local development environment to the internet. However, ngrok (and similar tunnel tools) is blocked by our firewall. IT admin does not want to allow these tools.

Two questions:

  1. Is there a way I can upload the files to Marketplace, keep the app as private and test it? Marketplace requires app artifact in .jar or .obr or .jwb. JIRA cloud add-on using node.js does not create these files.
  2. Maybe I can upload all files of add-on into google cloud instance and provide that location as base url in atlassian-connect.json? Has anyone tried it to bypass ngrok?

I use JIRA cloud and Atlassian connect.

Thanks
Ram

1 Like

Hi,
I think you are trying to create a server app listing. A could app listing only requires a descriptor URL.
Which means: you need to have already deployed your app somewhere before you can add it to Marketplace (even as a private listing).
Since you need to deploy your app somewhere (AWS / Heroku / etc), you might as well use that for testing. The dev loop will probably suck.
Another thing you can do is SSH port forwarding (aka SSH tunnel): What is an SSH Tunnel & SSH Tunneling?
I am not sure if there is a service you can use out there, or you have got to have your own server on the Internet to SSH into (an AWS EC2 would work).
Regards,
Norman

3 Likes

Thanks @natashbar. Very helpful. Should I deploy entire codebase (incl views, routes, app.js, atlassian-connect.json, etc.,) into one location in GCP/AWS and provide that as descriptor URL?

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Can’t we use pm2 on node server for background server?